Updated at 4:28 p.m. ET

Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and the NFL have reached an agreement to settle his allegations that league teams colluded to deny him a contract after his controversial protests in which he took a knee during the national anthem.

The league has also reached a deal with Carolina Panthers safety Eric Reid over similar collusion allegations.

A lawyer for Kaepernick, Mark Geragos, tweeted that after discussions, the “parties have decided to resolve their pending grievances.” The NFL issued an identical statement.

Details of the agreement are not public. But, as The Associated Press notes, “Considering the lost salary both players claimed and legal costs, the settlement could have climbed into the tens of millions.”

“The resolution of this matter is subject to a confidentiality agreement so there will be no further comment by any party,” the statement said.

Kaepernick said he was protesting the treatment of African-Americans and other minorities in the United States. He started his protests in August 2016. When he became a free agent at the end of the season, he was not picked up by any team. He filed a grievance in 2017 alleging collusion among team owners to keep him out of the NFL.

The quarterback scored a major victory last August, when the NFL arbitrator agreed to move forward with a formal hearing of his claims.

Collusion can be hard to prove, as NPR’s Tom Goldman has reported — but “to prove collusion, [Kaepernick] doesn’t have to show every team is conspiring — it can be as few as two teams, or one team and the league agree they want to keep out the former Super Bowl quarterback.”

Kaepernick’s protests inspired other players to take a knee during the anthem, sparking a political furor and major divisions between some players and team owners. Some fans interpreted the protests as an attack on patriotism and the military, leading to boycotts. President Trump encouraged team owners to take firmer action against the protests.

Kaepernick has also garnered significant acclaim. Last year, Nike announced that Kaepernick was the face of its famous “Just Do It” campaign. The ads show a close-up photo of his face, with the words, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”

Reid also was not signed after the 2016 season. The Carolina Panthers picked him up in 2018.

Kaepernick has praised Reid as the first person to kneel alongside him. “Eric is a social justice warrior, continues to support his family and communities in need,” he said last year.

The NFL Players Association issued a statement of support after the agreement was announced. “We continuously supported Colin and Eric from the start of their protests, participated with their lawyers throughout their legal proceedings and were prepared to participate in the upcoming trial in pursuit of both truth and justice for what we believe the NFL and its clubs did to them,” the NFLPA said.

It concluded: “We are glad that Eric has earned a job and a new contract, and we continue to hope that Colin gets his opportunity as well.”

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Lindsey Vonn is retiring as the winningest female ski racer in the world and one of the most decorated alpine skiers in U.S. history, ending a career in which she refused to let terrible injuries slow her down. In her final race Sunday, Vonn sped down the mountain to loud cheers, taking bronze in the downhill at the world championships in Are, Sweden.

Sunday’s medal makes Vonn the first female skier to win medals at six different world championships, and it also marks the fifth time she has won a medal in the downhill at a world championship.

“I laid it all on the line. That’s all I wanted to do today,” Vonn said. “I have to admit I was a little bit nervous, probably the most nervous I’ve ever been in my life. I wanted to finish strong so badly.”

Race organizers shortened the course in the morning due to fog and wind, which served Vonn well, as it reduced the pressure on her surgically repaired knees. Vonn recently announced she would retire early due to her injuries. She was originally set to end her career in December.

“After many sleepless nights, I have finally accepted that I cannot continue ski racing,” Vonn said last week of her decision to retire.

Vonn, 34, is the first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in the downhill. Her 82 World Cup victories are the most of any female skier — and she is stepping away from racing just four wins short of the all-time record held by Ingemar Stenmark. Vonn has also won seven World Championship medals, including twin golds in 2009.

“I have always pushed the limits of ski racing and it has allowed me to have amazing success but also dramatic crashes,” Vonn said in an Instagram post about her retirement, efficiently summarizing a career marked both by her daring and her resilience in coping with debilitating injury.

Vonn famously recovered from a crash that devastated her knee in 2013, and she has bounced back from broken bones and other injuries over her 18-year career. But she said recent problems with her knees forced her to make this week’s FIS Alpine World Ski Championships, in Are, Sweden, her last event.

One year ago, Vonn was winning races and seemed poised to break Stenmark’s World Cup record. She won a bronze medal in the downhill at the Pyeongchang Olympics.

In March of 2018, Vonn won a gold medal in the downhill at Are, and took a bronze in the Super-G. The strong showing capped a season that also included wins in Germany, Italy, and France.

Her final alpine racing season has been rough for Vonn, starting in November, when she suffered a heavy and awkward crash during a training run at Copper Mountain, Colo.

At the time, Vonn said she had a bone bruise and a sprained lateral collateral ligament in her knee. But she recently said the injuries were more serious than she had revealed, including a ligament tear and three fractures. Vonn said she withheld that information, and the news that she had surgery last spring, because “I have never wanted the storyline of my career to be about injuries.”

But it was the accumulating effects of injuries, she said, that led her to stop racing.

“My body is broken beyond repair and it isn’t letting me have the final season I dreamed of,” Vonn said before traveling to the world championships in Sweden. “My body is screaming at me to STOP and it’s time for me to listen.”

Days after she announced her decision to retire, Vonn crashed in her final Super-G race, in a dramatic fall that left fans and fellow skiers cringing. Vonn went airborne as she neared a gate, sending her through the center of the panel rather than around it.

With her skis tangled, Vonn sprawled across the snow and into the netting. Seconds before, she had been rushing down the hill at speeds of around 60 mph, drawing roars from the crowd.

A red medical sled was brought to take Vonn down the mountain. But instead of using it, the four-time Olympian stood up, took stock of herself, and clipped back into her skis. After a few minutes, she skied through the rest of the course, waving to acknowledge the crowd.

“I’m too old to be crashing that hard,” Vonn said in an interview with NBC at the bottom of the run. “Oh man. It’s just time to be done. It’s like my body is not doing what my mind is telling it to anymore, and I can’t be taking these kinds of risks anymore, and crashing that hard.”

She later added via Twitter, ” If adversity makes you stronger I think I’m the Hulk at this point….”

Vonn, who suffered a black eye and sore ribs from the crash, said the light had shifted on the race course, making it hard for her to judge the terrain through the goggles she was wearing. Up to that point, Vonn’s many fans, including rival skiers, had been cheering her on as she tried to carve time out of the course.

“I was charging,” Vonn said afterwards. “I wanted to lay it all out on the line.”

It was vintage Vonn, and proof that she wasn’t content to drift quietly into retirement. In being aggressive at the last world championships of her career, Vonn did what she has always done: pushing herself to be faster and attacking the course. And if she fell, she always got back up.

Vonn, the daughter of Alan and Linda Kildow, took up skiing at age 2. She grew up in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota — allowing her to develop her technical skills at the famous Buck Hill program run by ski-racing guru Erich Sailer in Burnsville. At age 12, Vonn moved to Vail, Colo., allowing her to train on larger mountains. Five years later, she made her Olympics debut in 2002.

Injuries are often blamed for taking away Vonn’s chances for more Olympic medals. But she was a dominant force on the world ski circuit, earning widespread respect for her athletic ability and tenacity. Her success, combined with the sense of personality she brought to her sport, helped Vonn win lucrative endorsement deals with brands from Head and Under Armour to Red Bull and Rolex.

As she continued to win, Vonn became the face of American skiing. Her image was on magazine covers from Sports Illustrated to Glamour. Her resilience and bravery set an example for younger skiers to follow. And Vonn’s celebrity hit a new peak when she and another elite athlete, golfer Tiger Woods, dated for three years. Along the way, she boosted the visibility of alpine skiing and raised expectations for Team USA on the international level.

As Vonn steps away from her sport, her U.S. teammate Mikaela Shiffrin seems ready and able to dominate women’s skiing for years to come. Fittingly, it was Shiffrin who won the Super-G race in which Vonn crashed on Tuesday, with the former slalom specialist securing her first world title in that speed discipline. At just 23, Shiffrin has won 56 races on the World Cup circuit — already putting her third on the women’s win list.

But on Sunday, it was all about Vonn, as one of the greatest skiers in the world said farewell to the sport that repeatedly broke her body — but whose thrills kept her coming back for more.

“I’ll miss that wonderful sensation of speed that you can get only by racing down a hill on a pair of skis,” Vonn said at a news conference in Sweden this week. “I don’t know yet how I will compensate for that, because I won’t be able to do it skiing privately without my ski pass being taken away from me.”

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Cross-country skiers have raced in Vasaloppet in Mora, Minn., since 1973. But Mora has only had enough natural snow once in the last seven years to put on the full race.

Enter Don Olson.

He’s 67, an engineer by day, and runs a 1,500-acre farm in the summer.

In the winter, he farms snow.

So, despite the trend of warmer winters and inconsistent snowfall, one of the country’s oldest cross-country ski races will go on this weekend, thanks to Olson and the group of volunteers he calls the ‘snow farmers.’

Part inventor, part stubborn Scandinavian, Olson drives a tractor that pulls a manure spreader he’s jury-rigged to spray artificial snow on the Vasaloppet’s 11-plus miles of the ski trail. One load of snow covers about 30 feet of trail. It will take the snow farmers about 2,000 loads to cover the 18-kilometer race course loop.

“A lot of people have worked their tails off to create this race, to keep it going,” he said. “At this point, I absolutely don’t want to see this tradition die in Mora.”

Lack of snow cancelled the race in 2012

A few years ago, Olson said, the possibility that the race might disappear was a real possibility.

Vasaloppet organizers canceled the race in 2012 when there wasn’t enough snow. It was the 40th anniversary of the race. “We had all kinds of plans,” Vasaloppet USA president Debbie Morrison said. “And we had to cancel the race.”

Three years later, they scraped together every snowflake they could find just to make a 2-kilometer loop.

“It was historically the shortest race, but we had a race,” Morrison said. “But we knew, from that point on, we couldn’t continue to do that. We had to take matters into our own hands.”

So the next winter, once it got cold enough, they started to make their own snow. The snow farmers were born — and they had three weeks to figure out how to cover the trail. Morrison said it was just in the nick of time.

“There has never been enough snow since, and we’ve been dependent on our snow farmers making the snow for us,” she said.

A Swedish legacy

The Mora Vasaloppet is a sister event to a race of the same name held in Mora, Sweden. The Scandinavian original runs 90 kilometers, the largest and oldest Nordic ski race in the world.

The Minnesota event offers races in a variety of lengths, the longest of which is 54 kilometers. For years, the races started in one spot and ended in another. But with the changes in weather that brought on the need to make snow, organizers have revamped it so that it’s now a loop race that begins and ends in downtown Mora.

And now, every winter, Olson and his team of volunteers plant a ribbon of white snow through the woods at the Vasaloppet Nordic Ski Center, even if the surrounding ground is brown and uncovered.

In the parking lot outside the Nordic Center, the snow farmers have set up a snow gun that feeds a giant pile of snow — sometimes 20 feet high — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week when it’s cold enough. They use a skid loader to dump it into the manure spreaders. Then they pull the manure spreaders behind their tractors and out on the ski trail, scattering snow where it’s needed.

Olson has seven snow farmers on his team, including a local farmer whose grandchildren race on the Mora High School team. A local doctor takes care of the snowmaking. Don’s two sons, who also work at his engineering business, are also part of the team. Two other volunteers groom the trails.

It’s a lot like crop farming, Olson said. They don’t punch a clock. They have a certain amount of work to get done, so they do it until it gets done.

“We put in a lot of hours,” he said. “I don’t even keep track of them. My wife laughs because she never sees me because I don’t get home until 10 or 11 o’clock at night. She’s already gone to bed.”

The snow farmers have a limited amount of time to make and haul all the snow they need in order to get the race course ready. So sometimes, Olson said, he’ll work 6 to 8 hours a day spreading snow — that’s after he’s finished his day job.

“We hauled out probably at least a load and a half, if not two loads, for every skier in the race,” last year, Olson said. “That’s a lot of snow.”

He estimates that was enough snow to cover an acre — an area a little bigger than the size of a football field — with snow 15 feet deep.

It can take a long time to dump just one load of snow. Sometimes the snow farmers have to make a 3-mile trip from the snow pile to the trail and back to dump just one load of snow.

More snow means more racers

They’ve got plans to set up a second snowmaking site as they prepare for next year’s race, which will shorten the amount of time they spend hauling.

Since their start a few years ago, the snow farmers have slowly expanded the amount of artificial snow they’ve been able to make each year. And race registration has picked up again. This weekend, 1,200 people are skiing.

That consistent snow coverage makes a huge difference for the Mora High School Nordic ski team, too, said coach Peter Larsen. One of the top skiers in the state is on this year’s team.

“We have our biggest team the school has ever had,” he said. “We had 79 skiers on the roster this year — from a high school that graduates just over 100.”

Last year, the snow farmers were named Minnesota State High School Nordic Ski Coaches Association’s volunteers of the year. In his nomination letter, Larsen called them “a generally Nordic-descended, Viking-stubborn, Einstein-crossed-with-MacGyver ingenious group of volunteers.”

And they’re essential.

“We would not be here today if we didn’t have the snowmaking equipment,” Morrison said. “It just wasn’t going to be possible.”

Talk to any cross-country skier in Minnesota, and they’ll say conditions have changed in recent years. In southern and central Minnesota, the only places to consistently ski are at parks that make artificial snow.

Winter is turning in a ‘poor performance’

Olson grew up on a farm just outside Mora. He’s seen climate change firsthand.

“I am absolutely convinced that the weather is changing — and changing fairly rapidly,” he said.

He’s right: Despite last week’s arctic blast, average winter temperatures in the Twin Cities have risen 6 degrees since 1970. That’s one of the fastest rates of warming in the country. But climatologist Kenny Blumenfeld, who works with the Minnesota State Climate Office, said climate change hasn’t necessarily meant less snow. It just means the snow is less predictable.

“We’re always going to have winter, so it would be kind of foolish to just get rid of the skis altogether,” he said. “But I think the writing is on the wall. We’ve seen winter repeatedly kind of turn in a poor performance.”

Morrison said she doesn’t know how much the snowmaking operation costs. It’s hard to figure out. Olson and others have donated tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, fuel — and time.

Morrison acknowledges it’s something Vasaloppet organizers will have to figure out in the future, so they’re not so dependent on volunteers. Olson figures someday they’ll have to pay people to haul snow or install expensive snowmaking equipment.

That’s what some parks in the Twin Cities have done: Hyland Hills Ski Area, Elm Creek Park Reserve and Theodore Wirth Regional Park have all installed 5-kilometer loops with underground infrastructure and snowmaking equipment. But it’s expensive. A a 3-kilometer ski track that opened in Duluth this year cost more than $3 million.

Until Mora joins them, the city will rely on its snow farmers, who refuse to let climate change and poor snow years get in the way of a skiing tradition.

“I will keep doing it as long as I can,” Olson said. “As long as I’m capable, I guess is, what I hope to do anyway. So hopefully I’m doing it for another 20 years.”

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Baseball Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, who made history as a player, manager and league executive, has died at 83 at his home in California.

Robinson, one of the game’s most feared sluggers and a fierce competitor, starred in both of baseball’s major leagues. He later became baseball’s first African-American manager.

“Frank Robinson’s resume in our game is without parallel, a trailblazer in every sense, whose impact spanned generations,” Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement. “He was one of the greatest players in the history of our game, but that was just the beginning of a multifaceted baseball career.”

Robinson broke into the majors in 1956 as a hot hitter and graceful fielder with the National League’s Cincinnati Reds. He was the NL Most Valuable Player in 1961, the same year the Reds won the league pennant. But by 1965, despite hitting 33 home runs and driving in 113 runs, the team’s management considered him old and expendable. Robinson responded to that judgment with a vengeance: In 1966, the year after he was traded to the American League’s Baltimore Orioles, he led the team to a World Series victory while winning the Triple Crown and the Most Valuable Player awards.

“Frank took us from being a good team in 1965 to being a great team in 1966,” Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer told the Baltimore Sun. “I’m glad Cincinnati thought he was ‘an old 30’ when they traded him.”

In the six years Robinson spent as an Oriole, the team went to the World Series four times and won twice, in 1966 and 1970.

ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian writes that “Robinson is one of the most underrated superstar players ever to play the game.”

“With that 1966 season, Robinson became the first — and remains the only — player to win the MVP in both leagues. He also finished third in the MVP voting twice, fourth twice and in the top 10 a total of 10 times. He made 13 All-Star teams. He won National League Rookie of the Year in 1956, hitting .290 with 38 home runs at age 20 for the Reds. And while he never led his league in a Triple Crown category other than in 1966 when he managed it in all three, he led his league in slugging percentage, OPS and OPS+ four times, including three years in a row (1960-62). And he led his league in runs scored three times, in being hit by pitches seven times and in intentional walks four times.”

Robinson is currently 10th on the all-time home run list with 586.

There are statues of Robinson at the ballparks in Baltimore and Cincinnati.

Robinson became a player-manager of the Cleveland Indians in 1975, hitting a home run on opening day that year at the age of 39.

He went on to manage the San Francisco Giants (1981-1984), and then returned to Baltimore as skipper (1988-1991) before ending his field career managing the Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals franchise (2002-2006).

Robinson also worked for the game off the field as a consultant, and then executive, with the commissioner’s office.

Born in Beaumont, Texas, Robinson was raised in West Oakland, Calif., where he attended McClymonds High School along with future NBA Hall of Famer Bill Russell.

In 2005, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush.

But it was as a slugger that Robinson may be best remembered. On June 26, 1970, he hit grand slam home runs in consecutive innings.

Consider this quote from his Hall of Fame page at Cooperstown:

“When asked by a fan how he would pitch to Frank Robinson, All-Star pitcher Jim Bouton replied, ‘Reluctantly.’ “

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