2026 Winter Olympic Hopeful: U.S. Cross Country Skier Jessie Diggins
At the Winter Olympics in 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall won the first gold medal ever for Team USA in cross country skiing. Randall is now retired. Can Diggins do it again?
Cross Country Skiing: European Domination
Since the inception of the winter games in 1924 no American had ever won a gold medal in cross country skiing prior to 2018. In fact before Diggins and Randal won gold, the last American to win any medal in cross country skiing was Bill Koch in 1976. That’s a 42-year drought between medals.
Cross-country skiing in the Olympics has otherwise been dominated mainly by European athletes. Until now.
The Team Sprint Race
In the team sprint event two athletes compete for each country. Diggins and Randall would represent Team USA.
The sprint course is just over .75 miles long. Each team completes a six-lap race, with members doing alternate laps. While one member races, the other rests. The total length of the race is 4.6 miles for women. So each skier is sprinting approx. 2.3 miles per race.
The team sprint begins with two semi-finals, from which 10 teams move ahead to the final. So the whole thing is a total 4.6 miles of sprinting per athlete. At the Olympic level the fastest teams are coming in at the finish in around 22 minutes. This averages out to three and ½ minutes per lap–220 seconds. It is pushing one’s (upper and lower) body to total exhaustion for around 220 seconds, then resting 220 seconds and repeating the cycle two more times.
Ski Jessie Ski!
In the 2018 Olympic sprint Diggins would anchor the final lap. As the skiers entered the Olympic Ski Stadium Diggins was still only in third place. Prior to this race her highest finish in any Olympic race had been fifth. But today is different. It’s her day. And she will not be denied.
Ahead of Diggins are two Olympic gold medalists: Maiken Caspersen Falla of Norway and Stina Nilsson of Sweden. Everyone is gassed. They are in the final sprint. The fans in the stadium are on their feet roaring. Below is a transcript of the US Announcers Steve Schlanger and Chad Salmela calling the race for NBC:
Salmela: Here comes Diggins! Here comes Diggins!
Schlanger: On the outside! Diggins making the play around Sweden!
Salmela: Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Gold!
Schlanger: Jessie Diggins to the line! And it is Jessie Diggins delivering a landmark moment that will be etched in U.S. Olympic history! The first-ever cross-country gold medal for the U.S.!
Salmela: It's a gold medal for the United States! It's not just a medal; it's the gold!
Diggins athletic performance was so inspiring that day that her US Teammates would later vote for her to carry the American flag in the closing ceremonies.
Fast Forward: 2022 Beijing China Winter Olympics
Kikkin Randall would retire after 2018 but Diggins kept going and would steadily improve. This would result in her winning a bronze medal in the women’s individual sprint in Beijing followed by a silver medal in the women’s 30-kilometer freestyle race. She was the first non-european to ever medal in this event. This would also make Diggins the most decorated American cross country skier in Olympic history.
But Diggins was not done. She would go on to win America’s first-ever individual cross-country skiing world title in February of 2023. And she would go on to repeat the feat a year later in 2024. As this story is being written Diggins has unarguably become the best cross-country skier in the world approaching the Milan-Cortina Games in twelve months.
“Brave Enough” : The Other Side of Jessie Diggins
In March 2020 Diggins autobiography “Brave Enough” was released. Born August 26, 1991, Jessie grew up in Afton, Minnesota, a very active, curious child. Per her website, after moonlighting as a dancer, soccer player, violinist, swimmer and track runner as a high school athlete, she finally settled on cross country skiing as a full-time passion. She would choose to defer a college scholarship after high school and pursue cross-country ski racing full time. The rest is history.
But there was another side to Jessie. A dark side that overwhelmed her. Jessie DIggins had an eating disorder as a teenager. As she writes in her book she picked up the phone in 2010 desperate and scared to call the The Emily Program; The Emily Program is an organization dedicated to teaching eating disorder awareness, providing treatment, and seeking lifetime recovery for patients.
“I was scared that without my eating disorder, I would immediately get fat and slow and wouldn’t race fast again. I was scared that without it, I wouldn’t make the National Team. I was scared to go into a recovery program, because I worried I wouldn’t be able to train enough. I was scared that if my club team knew I had an eating disorder, I’d get kicked off the team. I was scared that boys wouldn’t like me if they found out. Worse still, I was scared that they WOULD like me.”
Diggins is open about her journey including a relapse in 2023. She is a spokesperson for The Emily Program today offering a message of hope to women just like her that they are not alone, they can recover and they can live a healthy, meaningful life.
“Recovery is a marathon, not a sprint. There were many days when I thought ‘no way is this worth it’ because going through all the emotions and facing your eating disorder head-on, challenging your ingrained ways of thinking about yourself, your body, and food, is scary. But I was fortunate to have an amazing support system around me and over time, the process of making friends with food (and myself) got easier and easier. The stretches of time between my little slides back into my eating disorder got farther and farther apart.”
Now that is an inspiring story not just for athletes but for us all. Thank you Jessie Diggins for bringing Olympic glory to Team USA and a message of courage and hope to thousands of your fans.