For ski icon Diggins, pressure is a privilege
On the night before she began the 10-kilometer freestyle at the world Nordic ski championships in Planica, Slovenia, Jessie Diggins could barely sleep. In the hours before the race, she could not sit still. She was, by a layman’s assessment, a wreck. Yet she turned to Julia Kern — her teammate, her training partner of eight years, her roommate on the road, her best friend — and said, “You know, someday I’m going to miss this.”
“I’m going to miss being so passionate that you can’t even sleep over something,” Diggins said by phone Wednesday from Planica. “What a cool privilege — to get to be that nervous.”
Diggins is 31 and has felt all that her sport has to offer and has to take. It has been a decade since she has traveled back to her native United States in the middle of the winter because she gives what she has to crosscountry skiing. She does it not for the results. She does it for the feelings — even if they’re uncomfortable and unsettling, definitely when they’re inspiring and invigorating.
“Of course I want to win,” Diggins said. “You wouldn’t work this hard for this long if you truly didn’t care at all. So I want to win, but that’s not what keeps me going. It’s not what keeps me on the road. It’s more of just a love for this team and chasing the feeling of — ahhhhhhh — an amazing race. Because you learn so much about yourself when you have to dig that deep and push yourself
that hard.”
By this point, then, Diggins must have full understanding of her body and mind. When she completed Tuesday’s race — in which skiers start in intervals, meaning they’re racing the course and the clock rather than alongside each other — she utterly collapsed, gasping and writhing just across the finish line.
“I was in a lot of pain at the finish,” she said.
It’s an alarming image — unless you have watched her compete before. There was a cross-country ski race. Jessie Diggins competed in it. So everything she had to give was spent over those 10 kilometers. At the end, there is no more energy. There never is.
“I’m reminding myself: I just want to finish with nothing left,” she said. “That’s always the goal for me, to cross the finish line just knowing: No one’s ever trying harder. I want to really make sure that I could not have skied one second faster because then I’m going to feel proud of it no matter what the result is. I’m going to know that I left it all out there.”
What joy, then, when the pride in the performance matches the result. Diggins is already an iconic and historic figure in American cross-country skiing, and her race Tuesday broke another barrier: the first American gold medal in an individual race at the FIS Nordic world championships. She covered those 10 kilometers — which included climbs of more than 1,200 vertical feet — in 23 minutes 40 seconds. She beat Sweden’s Frida Karlsson by 14 seconds. She won her second medal of these championships — adding to the bronze she and Kern took in the team sprint. She now has six world championship medals, more than any American crosscountry skier in history.
Which is enough to make even the smiliest athletes — of which Diggins is a constant threat to reach the podium — absolutely sob. That’s what she did after she rolled around in the snow trying to rid herself of the pain and then absorbed the outcome: an unprecedented victory in a sometimes-trying year.
“I just felt such overwhelming gratitude,” Diggins said, and the tears resulted.
Go back to last year. Diggins, by now a three-time Olympic medalist — including the gold won in 2018 in Pyeongchang with teammate Kikkan Randall — married longtime boyfriend Wade Poplawski in her native Minnesota. She then had what she described as a “really wonderful” summer of training. She had won the World Cup overall title in 2021. She was accomplished and settled but also in her athletic prime. There was no reason she couldn’t make another run.
But because she has those Olympic medals and because she won that overall title and because she uses her status as a star to speak out on issues about which she cares deeply — climate change, eating disorder awareness — minor missteps can become major news. She caught a bug early in the year that hampered her some. Then, at the marquee Tour de Ski — a sevenleg, nine-day, three-country slog of an event that Diggins won in 2021 — she had consecutive finishes of 40th, 30th and 40th.
Back home, in the sporting mainstream, it hardly registered. In the European media — particularly in Scandinavia — Diggins’s showings were cause for concern. A Norwegian coach called for her to have a full health check and to drop out of the tour. The reality: An American coaching and support staff depleted by bouts with covid-19 misjudged the wax on her skis.
“This is a team sport,” Diggins said. “It’s really not an individual sport. When we win, we win as a team, and when we struggle, we don’t struggle alone.
“But it was hard for me because some of the international media really tore into me and they made it seem that I was struggling alone, and that was really, really hard. However, I have never felt more unconditionally loved and supported. The team really had my back. Athletes were quite literally giving me hugs to hold me up and were emotionally there for me, but it was really challenging. . . .
“I knew my body was in a good place, and I knew my fitness was in a great place, and I had some members of the media calling for a health check and insinuating that I was not well physically or mentally, which to me seems honestly very cruel because I’m one of the only people in this sport that openly talks about mental health and eating disorders and I do so out of a desire to really help people.”
She has helped people. She is helping people.
Sometimes it’s hard for Americans, when an athlete competes in a sport that is largely staged half a world away, to appreciate her accomplishments. The Olympics happen once every four years, and the success or failure of a career is too often — and too easily — associated with that world stage.
What Diggins has done — and is doing — is so worth noting. Maybe next February, when Minneapolis hosts a World Cup Nordic event — the first time such a competition will be held on U.S. soil since 2001 — more fans here will understand what she puts into her sport in a given year and what she gets out of it, whether there’s an Olympics or not.
It is a privilege to have that pressure. It is an honor to feel those nerves. And it is an obligation — in Diggins’s mind — to put every fiber of her being into every season, every race, every climb, every stride.
“I’m definitely not done,” she said.
Not in her career and not in this meet. There’s a relay Thursday. Here comes the tension again. How great is that?