Cross-country skiing has boomed during the pandemic year: skis are out of stock and parking lots are full at trailheads across the Snowbelt, because it’s an almost covid-proof activity. (The skis are about six feet long, so social distancing is essentially self-enforcing.) But recreational cross-country skiing—a gentle trek beneath snow-laden boughs, with a cup of hot chocolate as the reward—is a very long way from high-level cross-country ski racing on the World Cup circuit, which had to figure out a covid-19 strategy in order to pull off its season.
That season—a winter-long competition that tallies up all the main races across Europe, from November to March—comes to an end this weekend, and there’s no drama left about the outcome: the Minnesota native Jessie Diggins is uncatchably far ahead in the point system, and when she hoists aloft the winner’s crystal globe it will mark the first time that an American woman has ever taken the title. It’s a sporting accomplishment that deserves some serious appreciation.
Diggins has won big prizes before—she and her teammate Kikkan Randall captured Olympic gold in the sprint relay in 2018, a victory immortalized by the announcer Chad Salmela’s near-delirious call. But only one American, man or woman, has won the over-all title before—that was the Vermonter Bill Koch, back in 1982. Normally, Norwegians and Swedes, with the occasional Finn or Russian or Swiss, take this honor, because they come from countries where cross-country skiing has deep roots. It’s also much harder to pull off a winter of racing for North American competitors, who need to spend November to March living out of a suitcase, rather than nipping home between races to, say, Oslo or Stockholm.
For Diggins, the year began badly. She had used her post-Olympic influence to persuade the Fédération Internationale de Ski, in Switzerland, the sport’s highest governing body, to come to Minneapolis for a race last March, at the end of the season. The race would have been one of the first World Cup races held in this country in almost two decades, but it was cancelled just a couple days before it was to happen, owing to the rapidly emerging pandemic. Diggins and her teammates on the U.S. squad swallowed the disappointment and settled into the grind of summer training, not knowing whether there would even be a season come fall. And there almost wasn’t. Much international athletic competition stopped, but cross-country skiing’s governing board managed to get races underway in November in Finland. Soon after those opening contests, though, the Norwegians and Swedes announced that they were staying away from races—a reasonable stand, considering that lungs are the most important gear an endurance athlete possesses. The Americans were already in Europe, and they decided that it was at least as safe to stay there as it was to return to the country that had the highest rates of contagion, so they figured out safety protocols and hunkered down to race against skiers from other countries who made the same decision.
A season with some of the Europeans sidelined created a remarkable opportunity—suddenly, several American women were among the best skiers in the world, competing mainly against the Russians for dominance, week after week. From mid-December to early January, Rosie Brennan, of Alaska, wore the yellow bib conferred on the leader. She passed it to Diggins in January, during the winter’s premier event, the Tour de Ski, which featured eight races in two countries over ten days, the last one, called the Final Climb, straight up an alpine ski run. Cross-country skiing vies with cycling for the title of most strenuous sport; the VO2-max test is the gold standard for measuring aerobic endurance, and cross-country skiers rate at the top of those physiological charts, because their races require both arms and legs to operate at full power, often over long distances. The end of a race routinely features skiers sprawled in the snow just across the finish line, chests heaving—the scene looks less like a sporting event than a daguerreotype of a battlefield. But the Tour de Ski magnifies all of that: the strain of all-out racing day after day separates the very hardiest. This year, when the skiers reached the top of the downhill run on the last day—after racing up grades above forty per cent—Diggins had beaten not just the Russians but also the Swedes, who by then had returned to the circuit. She had raced right through the insurrection at the Capitol; the stars and stripes on her racing suit were a brave sight in those days, when the meaning of the flag was in real doubt.
The Norwegians began filtering back in the second half of the month, and among them was Therese Johaug, the greatest cross-country skier of her generation. (One would say of all time, but her even more dominant compatriot, Marit Bjoergen, retired from the World Cup.) Johaug won the season title last year, and she’ll likely do the same next year. The fact that she’d missed some of the racing meant that Diggins’s crystal globe would carry an asterisk. Except that, at the end of January, the two women met in Falun, Sweden, for a ten-kilometre race—an event that Johaug had last lost in 2016. Diggins, fresh off her Tour de Ski victory, was a tenth of a second behind her with the race about three-quarters done, but the finish was down a series of twisting and steep hills, which are Diggins’s forte. Her technique, much improved in recent years, is still no match for the serene glide of the Scandinavians, but she can descend deeper into what endurance athletes call “the pain cave” than anyone, persevering even when her muscles are flooded with lactate. (“I couldn’t feel my legs for much of this race,” she wrote, on her blog, of one ten-kilometre event.) As the longtime U.S. coach Matt Whitcomb told me, “Jessie goes hard from the gun, which is a thrilling style to watch. She races with Steve Prefontaine grit, and I’m sure the most important strength she has developed is this ability to endure pain. She pushes into it. Her tactic is to suffer, and a lot of it has gone into winning this globe.” Above all, she tears down hills with gleeful abandon. When she crumpled across the finish line, she had come from behind to beat Johaug by 2.1 seconds. So, no asterisk.
It wasn’t entirely a storybook season. The World Championships, which are held biennially, are the sport’s third great prize, along with the World Cup season title and the Tour de Ski. At the Championships, which wrapped earlier this week, in Oberstdorf, Germany, Diggins finished fourth in two races. She was doubtless weary, after a full season of racing and her Tour de Ski win, but the deeper problem may have been the heat. Diggins, a bona-fide global-warming activist, who has travelled to Congress to demand action, found herself racing in near-sixty-degree temperatures. For the ten-kilometre race, she cut off the sleeves and the bottoms of the legs of her racing suit, packed her top with snow, and had coaches throw water on her as she raced past, but she still came up a few seconds short of the podium.
Next February, of course, there will be a Winter Olympics, in China—assuming that the pandemic has diminished and that the rest of the world overlooks the Chinese government’s human-rights abuses in Xinjiang and assembles, as planned, in Beijing. Diggins, who is twenty-nine, should be in her absolute prime during the next few seasons, with most of the doubts that can gnaw at younger athletes behind her. In her memoir, she describes her successful battles with eating disorders. (When she races, her headband, instead of advertising a sponsor, spreads the word about the Emily Program, an affiliate of the University of Minnesota Medical School, where she was treated.) Now she has not just an Olympic gold medal but a crystal globe in her trophy case. If you want someone worth rooting for, look no further.
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