Jessie Diggins’s Last Run
Nordic skiing, as its name implies, is the furthest thing from an American sport. Its greatest champions have been Scandinavians, whose names would mean nothing to most Americans—not even that of the incomparable Johannes Klæbo, who became the greatest winter Olympian of all time this year at the Milano Cortina Games by grabbing all six golds that the sport offers. Norway, Sweden, and Finland provide the iconic backdrops for cross-country skiing, along with a scattering of historic venues in Russia and Central Europe. For devoted fans, Davos is only secondarily the place where billionaire oligarchs gather to plot world domination; more important, it usually hosts the last World Cup races before Christmas. A chief sponsor of the World Cup tour is not Nike or Ford but Le Gruyère AOP, as in the Swiss cheese—winners of select races get a big wedge.
Still, there is a Nordic-skiing nation within the United States, almost perfectly contiguous with the geography most likely to spend the winter covered with snow: the highlands of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont; the northern reaches of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota; often-isolated spots in the Rockies, the Cascades, and the Sierras (places like Bozeman, Sun Valley, Washington’s Methow Valley, Truckee in the High Sierra, Boulder and points west in Colorado); and Alaska. Big parts of that scattered nation gathered over this past weekend in another of its beloved centers, Lake Placid, in the remote and sparsely populated Adirondack Mountains of New York, to watch an exceedingly rare U.S. edition of the World Cup—three days of racing that served not just to thrill fans that crowded the racecourse but also to outline the emotional contours of the sport in this country.
A recent death hung over the proceedings, that of John Caldwell, who passed away last month, at the age of ninety-seven. He wrote the book on cross-country skiing in America—it was, in fact, called “The Cross-Country Ski Book”—and, after its publication, in 1964, it sold around half a million copies, helping to ignite a boom in the sport. Caldwell’s own progeny made up no small part of that explosion (his son and several of his grandchildren have competed in the Olympics), and at Vermont’s Putney School Caldwell coached America’s first cross-country superstar, Bill Koch, who won an Olympic medal in 1976. Koch was on hand in Lake Placid to give out awards; many of the Americans competing had grown up racing in the Bill Koch League, including Bill’s son, Will. The best of the current American men—Ben Ogden, who came away from this winter’s Olympics with a pair of silvers—grew up in the same rural Vermont Zip Code as Koch, and he spent a considerable portion of his early life skiing the back-yard course that Koch had groomed for himself and his neighbors. (Ogden explained to a Vermont Public Radio reporter after one race that he consumes “mostly maple syrup for training and racing fuel.”) The elder Caldwell went to Dartmouth, as did many of the American Nordic Olympians of the past six decades who gathered on the stage at Lake Placid’s Mt. Van Hoevenberg ski complex after the first day of the races; others hailed from Middlebury College, which also produced the American cross-country team’s current head coach, Matt Whitcomb, and even one of the announcers calling the races live for NBC, Chad Salmela.
But it was a daughter of the Midwestern branch of this Nordic family who drew the crowds to northern New York this weekend—Jessie Diggins, who grew up near the Twin Cities, and who went on (with some coaching and training from Caldwell’s son Sverre) to become the greatest American ever to put on a pair of skinny skis, and arguably the greatest winter endurance athlete this country has ever produced. Diggins used her star power to persuade the Europeans who run the World Cup to turn their attention to the U.S. for the first time in decades, holding a pair of races in her native Minnesota two years ago (after a COVID delay). That event was such a triumph, with some twenty thousand spectators enthusiastically crowding onto a Minneapolis golf course, that she was able to lure the Europeans back for what she had announced would be her retirement races, following her last Olympics in Milan, where she took home a bronze. (She has won four Olympic medals, including a gold, and seven World Championships medals.)
Diggins has captured the soul of this Nordic nation not only because she’s been so successful—as the races ended Sunday, she was awarded her fourth “crystal globe” marking her as over-all World Cup champion for the entire season—but because of the way she races. Unlike her Scandinavian competitors, who tend toward both elegant technique and northern reserve, she has earned her victories by descending dramatically into what she calls the “pain cave.” She powers up hills, sometimes wasting energy as her bobbing head flings her ponytail side to side; she skis the downhills with unmatched speed and abandon; she crosses the finish line utterly spent, often collapsing into a heap of heaving breath and cramping muscle. (There’s even a “Diggins Collapse Index” online, ranking her post-race sprawls on the snow.) It’s the same off the course: she’s told, with rare candor, the story of her battles with an eating disorder; Peacock is currently streaming a documentary on her career called “Threshold.”
In Lake Placid, the Minnesota state flag was prominent around the course, and American flags flew, too, if not a sea of them. In fact, many of the Minnesotans in attendance wore buttons that expressed their opinions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers; many of those who cheered Diggins on two years ago spent this winter blowing whistles to protect their neighbors. (The sport definitely skews liberal. When Ogden won his first silver medal—something no American man had done since Koch, fifty years ago—he was asked how it might change his life. Perhaps, he said, he could leverage it to meet one of his heroes, Bernie Sanders.) But for every shirt bearing a slogan, there were ten cheeks covered in (biodegradable) glitter like the kind that Diggins sprinkles on her face before every race. Diggins, for all her grit, has also brought a sparkle to the sport. The love for her was palpable; you could follow her progress around the course just by listening for the cheers that would arise as she turned each corner. She perhaps arrived too worn from the Olympics to dominate the proceedings; she mustered a fifth-place and a ninth-place finish in the first two races, but it didn’t matter. Handmade “Thank You, Jessie” signs waved around the track.
The American crowd—perhaps, in part, because so few of their countrymen and women have risen to the very top of the sport—are also renowned as knowledgeable fans of skiers from other nations. They cheered long and hard for Klæbo on Friday, as he plowed through a dumping snowfall with his usual grace, winning easily. Klæbo—injured earlier this month after a collision with Ogden that left him concussed—decided to skip Saturday’s sprint races, where he otherwise would have been the prohibitive favorite. That left the door open for a beloved Italian star, Federico Pellegrino, who, like Diggins, is retiring after this competition. Pellegrino soaked in the crowd’s affection during his warmup laps, as they chanted his nickname, Chicco Pelle. “I got this feeling of power coming from the public,” he said after the race. “Cheering for me,” he added, and when he won he donned a cowboy hat, to the throng’s delight. Klæbo returned to the course on Sunday for the last race of the season, a gruelling twenty-kilometre odyssey through the steep climbs and drops of the wooded track, and won with his usual aplomb. At times, as the other racers sweated and strained in a pack behind him, he would swivel his head to survey their progress, looking for all the world like a fourth-grade teacher taking his somewhat unruly charges on a field trip.
And then it was time for Diggins’s last race, over the same course that the men had just completed. I hiked to the high point of the course, which the skiers passed five times, in front of a crowd growing ever more ecstatic. (Ogden, done with his race, was standing by the side of a trail, revving a chainsaw to add to the excitement.) Each time they reached the top of the climb, Diggins was hanging on to the best Swedes and Norwegians, surely telling herself this was the last time she’d ever have to hurt in quite this fashion. As they headed downhill on the fifth lap for the finish, it seemed a reasonable bet she’d end up on the podium, but then—accelerating down a tricky drop—she went into an arm-spinning crash that knocked her back to twelfth.
No matter, really—it put not the slightest damper on the retirement celebration that followed, with many thousands of fans standing to watch her get her crystal globe for the season’s championship, not to mention a check from the Gruyère folks for winning the most podiums in a season, dedicated to a youth ski league that she had attended. And the crowd stayed to watch as six hundred young skiers—many of whom were little girls, with glitter on their cheeks—glided around the ski track in the stadium and then stood there in a phalanx, an honor guard as Diggins took a ceremonial last lap.
Surely they are the future of this Nordic nation that Diggins has worked so hard to help preserve, a legacy that should mean that, fifty years hence, she’ll be up on the stage handing out prizes the way that Bill Koch did this weekend. Except for one thing. As I was skiing away from Mt. Van Hoevenberg to the cabin where I was staying, it was impossible not to notice that the snow was turning to slush as a drizzle fell in the Adirondack twilight. This has been the second-warmest winter on record in the contiguous U.S., with snowpacks in the West at a fraction of their normal depth—and that was before the latest heat dome struck, even as the races were under way. Friday, the first day of competition in Lake Placid, saw the hottest March temperature ever recorded in the country: a hundred and twelve degrees in California and Arizona.
It’s not that Diggins and her colleagues aren’t trying to do something about it. She and the third American medallist at the Milan Olympics, the Alaskan Gus Schumacher, have both met with members of Congress to discuss global warming; they’re stalwarts of an athlete-led nonprofit called Protect Our Winters. But, this past weekend, with the country whose flag they’ve worn bombing Iran to force it to open the Strait of Hormuz to more oil tankers, it all felt a little ominous. The entire sport of cross-country skiing derives from the pleasure of gliding across the snow—you kick hard and your reward is that skim, that float. But it only works when it’s cold. After Diggins’s first race, on Friday, when snow squalls had slowed her down, I asked her about the way conditions could change so suddenly for skiers. If she were worried about that, she said, she’d have stayed with swimming, her first sport—in the pool the weather is not an issue. “But that’s what makes skiing so exciting, so magical,” she said. “It’s a partnership with the weather.” Diggins has done just about everything she can to single-handedly encourage and thrill her nation within a nation; it’s going to take a joint effort to protect the winter that has always defined that once cold country. ♦