Jessie Diggins wins third Tour de Ski as her final season builds toward Olympics

5 days ago 2

It really didn’t have to go this way.

American cross-country skiing star Jessie Diggins, in her final season, didn’t have to be tearing up the World Cup like this. This could have been just a ceremonial glide over the horizon. And yet, here we are. She’s sitting atop the standings after winning the Tour de Ski — think a week-long version of cycling’s Tour de France, but on cross-country skis — on Sunday, the third win of her career in the prestigious event.

Diggins has three first-place finishes this season, and she’s been on the podium seven times in 14 races. She won twice and made four podiums across the six Tour de Ski races in the past week, including a second-place finish Sunday in the final stage to clinch the tour victory. She’s leading the race for the overall title that she’s won each of the last two years.

There’s a long way to go, including the biggest races of the season at the Olympic Games in Italy in February. But so far, Diggins, at 34, is giving herself quite the sendoff.

“It’s been super fun, and unexpectedly delightful to be racing with the wild joy of knowing it’s my last time,” Diggins wrote in a text message from the Dolomites in northeastern Italy, ahead of the final weekend of racing at the Tour de Ski. “It’s also bittersweet, especially saying goodbye to people, like the lovely family-run hotels we stay in.”

Winning races and major events. Bouncing from one picturesque European winter haven to another, with comrades and teammates. Soaking up the love that comes with a farewell tour. It’s pretty good to be Jessie Diggins these days.

On Thursday, after she won the 20-kilometer pursuit in the Tour de Ski’s third-to-last stage, the good folks of Toblach, Italy, brought her up to one of the bridges in the course to cut a ribbon and told her that the bridge would heretofore be named the Jessie Bridge. These things happen when you win eight times in a region during the course of your career and finish on the podium 14 times.

Heading into the last stage of the Tour de Ski and its notorious and brutal final climb with a lead of more than a minute, Diggins had one clear goal.

“The big thing, honestly, is not let anyone mess with me,” she said to a representative of the U.S. skiing federation Saturday. “Stay on your feet.”

She did, extending her final margin of victory to over two minutes. And she had another Tour de Ski title in her bag. She also won in 2021 and 2024.

This time around, Diggins has had some American company on the victory stand. On Wednesday, both she and Gus Schumacher won the 5-kilometer mass start race, the first time an American man and woman won cross-country races on the same day.

Those wins continued what had been a pretty magical start to the season for Americans on snow, in cross-country and Alpine. Mikaela Shiffrin is 5-for-6 in slalom races after her winning streak was snapped Sunday, and is sitting atop the overall standings after coming back from a devastating crash and working through the challenges of post-traumatic stress disorder last year. At 41, Lindsey Vonn has come out of her five-year retirement and reasserted herself as the woman to beat in downhill as well as a fearsome threat in super-G.

Vonn swears she is headed back to retirement after this World Cup season, too. Both she and Diggins have a chance to pull off that rarest of feats in sports — riding off into the sunset on top. Far more often, star athletes hang around until age and injury render them a shadow of their former selves, unable to pull themselves away from the adrenaline rush of competing.

Diggins has the advantage of participating in a sport that can be more friendly than others to athletes in their late 30s and even early 40s. In some ways, that makes it even more remarkable that she has decided to call it quits now. This last version of Diggins may very well be the best one yet.

“I think that 34-year-old Jessie probably beats 29-year-old Jessie or 28-year-old Jessie,” Jason Cork, Diggins’ longtime coach, said in an interview during the fall.

Like most Americans, Diggins is better at skate skiing than the classic technique, in which skiers have to generate speed and power while keeping their skis parallel. Her technique has continued to improve throughout her career.

“In cross-country skiing, there’s so many pieces to the puzzle,” Cork said. “And if you’re able to stay focused in setting goals, and just not decline very quickly in this aspect while you still gain a little bit more in that aspect, it ends up kind of staying a little more consistent.”

For years, Diggins had to think about how to ski properly in classic races and during training — how to drive her knee just so to kick the ski. She would hear herself thinking “right foot, left foot.” She also understands racing strategy better than she ever has, incorporating the knowledge she has gained in 15 years on the World Cup tour. She knows when to surge and when she can fall back and bide her time.

“Now it just flows a little bit more,” she said.

As for the other part of the puzzle, the endurance, Diggins has rarely had trouble remaining motivated. And long ago, she and Cork tried to come up with the formula for cracking the longevity code, attempting to reduce it to a matter of math.

Diggins breaks up her training into intensity zones, spending roughly 80 percent of her time training at low intensity and about 20 percent at high intensity to limit the wear and tear on her body. Each year, they’ve added a little more training, ramping up slowly, with far more focus on adding volume rather than intensity.

What does that look like? As little as five extra minutes a day, which ends up being about 30 extra minutes a week, but 25 hours additional each year, 250 hours more than she trained a decade ago and nearly 400 hours more than she was training when this journey started back when she was in her late teens.

“We sit down in the spring, and she’s got three or four pages of single-spaced goals on everything from physiological stuff to strength to day-to-day to mental, just goals,” Cork said. “You can’t just be like, ‘Ah, I’ll just go do what I did last year and see how that turns out.’ You have to be like, ‘Where was I good? Where did I slip? Or where do I still need improvement?’ And just keep looking for ways to get better. And if you always try to find some place to improve, you’re probably going to improve. At the very least, you’re not going to get worse.”

That certainly has not happened for Diggins. The challenge now is figuring out how to manage her emotions during this final run through the tour, knowing when to click into race mode and when to take a moment to let the sentimentality and even a bit of anticipated nostalgia sink in as retirement approaches.

“I’m sad because I love the people, excitement and the atmosphere,” she said after what is likely to have been her final win in Toblach, where she won her first race back a decade ago in 2016. “And I’m not sad because it’s just hard on your body, and being nervous, and you get up and you get down, and it’s such a roller coaster.”

In other words, no matter how many more races she wins and how many more bridges get named for her, her mind is not changing.

“I’m enjoying it one last time, but next year, I’m going to be happy to be watching it on TV,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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