Get ready. Here it comes. Maybe the rarest thing in sports these days — the epic mic drop.
Assuming she can collect 3 more points in the season’s final weekend, Jessie Diggins is going out on top after 15 seasons with another crystal globe as the world’s best overall cross-country skier.
She’s 34. She’s the best skier in the world. She’s probably the best version of her competitive self she’s ever been, which is saying something, given she has won three season-long overall titles before, including the last two.
And she’s done. Or will be, as she’s retiring at the end of the World Cup finals, after three more races this weekend in Lake Placid, N.Y. She leads the World Cup standings by 342 points over Sweden’s Moa Ilar. The most points possible over the weekend are 345, leaving Diggins in position to clinch as soon as Friday’s first race, the 10-kilometer. She’ll try to secure the title while simultaneously heading into the pain cave one last time and taking it all in.
Then again, that’s what she has been doing all year on this relentless march to the final finish line. No second thoughts. No regrets. Just Diggins doing what Diggins does: Sprinkle glitter on the cheeks, head to the start line, go to the limit, maybe climb a podium when the day is done, and then do it all over again, sometimes the next day, sometimes the next week in some other far-flung location.
Jessie Diggins has worn the yellow bib, given to the overall World Cup leader, since the season’s first weekend. She can clinch another title as early as Friday. (Leo Authamayou / NordicFocus / Getty Images)
“It’s kind of coming to a close at the right time, and it feels really peaceful,” Diggins said during an interview this week from her home near Boston. “I don’t feel like I’ve left anything on the table. I don’t feel like there’s any boxes left unchecked. I’m just sort of like, no, this was a nice victory lap of a year where I got to just enjoy all these venues one last time and just really soak up the experience of being with all these people that I love.”
The thing is, most victory laps happen after the last victory has taken place, when there are no more victories to be had. Diggins has won plenty, and she is about to wrap up arguably the biggest prize of all.
She won the prestigious Tour de Ski in January. She won races in Trondheim, Norway, and Toblach, Italy. She landed on the podium eight other times on the World Cup circuit. At the Olympics, she crashed and injured her ribs in the first race, then came back and won the bronze medal just days later in the 10-kilometer skate.
Even though she finished third that day, the race will undoubtedly go down as one of her signature performances. In the last 100 meters, when she was grinding out a medal by just 3.3 seconds, it would have been far more effective for her to stand up and use her poles, but she couldn’t stand up with the pain stabbing through her midsection. Still, she set aside the pain and found a way as her upper body collapsed toward one side. There was a primal scream as she crossed the finish line and crumbled into the snow, which was hard to listen to.
And yet, Diggins said none of those wins and podium appearances have anything to do with what made this last journey through the circus of elite cross-country skiing so special for her.
At the Olympics, she had so much family and so many friends there, people who couldn’t make the trip to South Korea (in 2018) or Beijing (in 2022) for those Games. That was pretty great.
The high point in U.S. cross-country history: In 2018, Jessie Diggins, left, and Kikkan Randall teamed for the Americans’ first-ever Olympic gold in the sport. (Odd Andersen / AFP via Getty Images)
But also, all season, during races and as she trekked across the snow from the finish area at the end of the day, she kept hearing from fans about how much she had meant to them. They loved the way she raced, and they loved how she had shown up — going public about her ongoing struggles with disordered eating, her advocacy for better climate change policy, the way she puts glitter on the cheeks of really any racer who asks for it, the way she smiles on the start line and then leaves everything on the snow.
“In so many different countries, after the race,” she said, “you kind of walk back up towards the truck, and often there’ll be, like, a section along the fence where fans can ask for autographs, for pictures. And the interactions with people, where they have told me what I’ve meant to them and how I’ve … helped them through really hard times, either with mental health or physical challenges — a lot of them had me sign their gloves. They’ve gotten my special Jessie gloves. Or they had brought a copy of my book. Or they came out with glittery signs that said, ‘Thank you, Jessie’ in English even though we’re in Finland.”
In Lahti, Finland, earlier this month, teenage girls chased her through the woods with their signs. In Oslo, Norway, last weekend, fans swarmed her to say goodbye.
All that is everything to Diggins. At some point, she’s not sure when, winning stopped being the goal but rather a means to an end — to share her story and what is important to her and show people they can do hard things, too.
Maybe, most importantly, she wanted to leave U.S. cross-country skiing in a better place than where she found it. There’s no doubt she has done that. Ben Ogden, one of her training partners and someone who has looked up to her as a role model since he was a young teenager, has emerged as a rising star. Diggins helped make him believe he could compete with the best skiers in the world.
Ogden won two silver medals at the Olympics this year, the first Olympic hardware in men’s cross-country for the U.S. in 50 years. He teamed up with Gus Schumacher to take the second one just days after the first.
“You can tell that they think deeply, like, ‘How can I help make the team better?’” she said. “That’s something that I put enormous value on.”
None of that happens by accident, she said. She long ago figured out it was the furthest thing from a burden.
“People have to intentionally put focus on being a good teammate and putting energy into the team,” she said, “but it really comes back.”
For Diggins, it always has. She’s not going to race anymore, but she will be around occasionally, she said. Hopefully, for the sake of the team, that energy and ethos will get passed on from one generation to the next.
There’s no better mic drop than that. Is there?
