Having reached the summit of cross-country skiing (again), the former Olympic champion opens up about a relapse that nearly thwarted her season
Cross-country skiing at the elite level feels closer to survivalism than sport, a staredown with existential resistance that requires a tolerance for suffering bordering on inhumane and an appetite for pushing past the outer limits of what the body and mind believe is possible. Jessie Diggins calls it the “pain cave”, the place that endurance athletes enter when they’ve willed themselves beyond their breaking point and every muscle group is gripped with an agony that would leave the rest of us mortals supine and helpless along the trail. Diggins’ hard-won mastery of this aerobic mental and physical torture chamber is what’s carried her from small-town Minnesota to the summit of a sport that was dominated by Europeans for more than a century. That is, until she came along.
It’s been four days since Diggins nailed down her second World Cup overall title to put the finishing touches on the most successful season ever for an American cross-country skier. The 32-year-old from the tiny St Paul suburb of Afton (population: 2,951), whose trademark glitter, megawatt smile and almost nuclear positivity have become her calling cards, could clinch the crown with no worse than a 20th-place finish in last Sunday’s season-ending women’s 20km mass start freestyle in the Swedish town of Falun. But rather than playing it safe, Diggins conjured a sensational knockout blow on a course tailor-made to her strengths. Clustered with a gaggle of rivals entering the closing 2.5km, Diggins broke free with one final lung-busting sprint and crossed the finish line first by ninth-tenths of a second ahead of Norway’s Heidi Weng for her sixth individual win of the season, cementing herself as the world’s most dominant cross-country skier.
