TESERO, Italy — The race marshal has just cried out his five-minute warning, but Jessie Diggins appears lost to it all.
There is a ritual to these moments, to this preparation, and in her final Olympic appearance, the USA’s most decorated cross-country skier of all time will remain unhurried. Her universe is defined by the particulars.
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She still wears a hefty plaster on her ribs, the blueing medal of a crash that took place just two kilometers into her Olympics on the opening Saturday. “It’s honestly caught me off guard with how much it hurts to ski right now,” she wrote in a post on Instagram.
Just five days later, Diggins won bronze, her fourth Olympic medal overall, in the 10-kilometer freestyle.
Her red headband is already on, bearing, as always, the logo of The Emily Program — the eating disorder charity that helped her through the most difficult moments of her career, which she now wears as a reminder, not to herself but others.
Under Olympic rules, she will have to take the headband off before the race starts. No such regulations exist for the glitter daubed on her cheeks, battle paint mimicked by hundreds in the grandstand facing her.
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Now, and only now, she climbs into her race vest. The number is one. At 34, and in her last season, Diggins leads the World Cup standings. She may well win the crystal globe in Lake Placid next month, her final meet before retirement.
That number gives her a privilege. She moves to the front of the racers’ queue, a rare pass she has not had to work for. Silence falls, tangible enough to be sketched by charcoal. Then the gun.
And so she begins, one final time, pushing pell-mell into a sport increasingly shaped in her image.
Sunday was the debut of the women’s 50km at the Olympic Games. Diggins had long advocated for its inclusion, incensed at the inequality with the men’s events, the insinuation that women were only able to race 30km.
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“When I got to the World Cup, I didn’t understand why,” she said in a pre-Olympic press conference. “Why do we not get to do these big, epic races that are pretty iconic and pretty legendary in our sport?”
She got to do it in her final Olympic race. The previous night, the withdrawal of the overwhelming favourite, Sweden’s Frida Karlsson, sparked the obvious question: Could Diggins sign off with an Olympic medal?
One impediment was the format. The 50km was raced in the classic style, with Diggins far stronger in the freestyle “skate” technique, in which she has taken the vast majority of her World Cup wins. The length, however, was expected to favor Diggins — an athlete with the preternatural ability to dig deeper than human suffering should allow.
It is why she chimes with so many. Watch her win the team sprint relay in Pyeongchang eight years ago alongside Kikkan Randall, the USA’s first-ever Olympic cross-country gold. It is visible that none of this comes easy as she double-poles herself forward, gasping like a gutted fish.
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Watch her at any finish line, and she is liable to collapse, spent, knowing she extracted every ounce of ability that day. “I’m going to die,” she hyperventilated after her bronze in the 10km.
But this is only part of Diggins’ relationship with pain. She has been open about her eating disorder, first suffering from bulimia in her teens, managing it, becoming an Olympic champion, and relapsing in 2023.
“If someone out there is watching this or listening to this or reading this, and they’re struggling, you can do this too,” she said during these Olympics. “And I know that because when I was 18, I thought that would be my life. And I thought my life would actually be quite short because of my eating disorder. I was in a really tough place.”
Recovery came, an effort she calls the most difficult push of her career. Diggins learned to weaponise her vulnerability, to use her experience to help others. In a sport known for its unhealthy relationship with weight, she is the biggest advocate for breaking the taboo. The U.S. cross-country team, pushing a wider trend across the sport, has now made body image an open conversation.
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“You can survive without an eating disorder in professional sports,” she wrote in a blog post for The Emily Program updated this January. “More than that, you can thrive. The eating disorder I once relied on hurt my career in the short term. It did not ruin my life.”
Over the past seven years, she has lived by a mantra: Just because I’m good at being in pain, it doesn’t mean I always have to be.
Diggins is hurting now. Dropped by the leaders at the end of the first lap, she hauls her way back on the downhill. Another lap later, and approaching the 15km mark, she is down to sixth and struggling with her skis.
“I was doing everything I could to make them work,” she said post-race. “I knew I had to switch them early.”
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She veers to the left, strapping on her alternate pair. With 30 seconds lost, she is now down to ninth. Urgently, she heaves herself back onto the tracks — and stumbles, twice, her knees hitting the snow. The skis bend but do not crack.
Her only option is the same as it ever was. Chase up the course ahead.
There have been other stumbles by U.S. athletes during these Olympics. Most notoriously, figure skater Ilia Malinin fell twice during last the men’s final, tearing away a gold medal that had looked destined to be his for the past four years. It was visible, and it was public.
In the days after, Malinin demonstrated his own vulnerability. He spoke openly about the pressure of the Olympics, of his own mental health; he used his own fall to lift others. Malinin is his own man, but this is also the environment Diggins has engendered.
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There are traces of her approach, too, in the performance of Alysa Liu, gold medalist in the women’s final six days later. Liu’s story, having placed well-being above performance before recognising how that self-awareness ultimately made her stronger, has hallmarks of Diggins’ recovery.
“(Diggins) is so valuable because of not only her talent, but because of how she’s really present with us as a team,” Diggins’ teammate, 23-year-old Kendall Kramer, said after the 50km. “She just wants to give tips, pointers and pass the flag to the next generation.
“Going to the World Cup for the U.S. is really hard because we can’t just travel back home. It would be easy for her to keep really to herself, but she’s created such a good environment, a culture that makes our team special.”
Diggins may have four Olympic medals and seven in world championships. But this is the other subtext of her legacy — demonstrating to the winter sport community that there is another way of excellence.
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Charging up the slush of the Dolomites, Diggins’ career is not over yet. The middle laps of this race have been a masterclass in tactical planning.
Up front, Sweden’s Ebba Andersson and Norway’s Heidi Weng are too far ahead, but at this moment, Diggins is the quickest athlete on course. Her skis are now fresh, better able to handle the conditions than her fading rivals.
The dull glint of bronze resembles the low sun in the sky. But for Diggins, perhaps more than any other athlete at these Games, her performance and the result are not distinct; for her, the performance is the result. She forges on, mainly with skiers 10 years her junior.
“Literally every muscle in my body started cramping with three laps to go,” she recalled post-race.
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Others change their skis and begin to recover. Diggins starts to drop back on the uphills — one second off the back, back with the group, two seconds off, back with the group — but remains grimly with her quintet. The pain on her face progresses like erosion; it starts with a trickle of sweat, cracks becoming writ across her forehead, before, where her mouth should be, a yawning chasm.
Five minutes up the course, Andersson drops Weng to win the race. She has her own redemption story — three falls in the women’s 4×7.5km relay, condemning her team to silver. It was the only women’s race in which Sweden failed to take gold — but Andersson’s joy is unbridled here.
Then, after an embrace in the finish area, both still gasping, Andersson and Weng both shade their eyes to stare back up the hill.
The group is thinning in the fight for bronze, the Austrian and Finnish contenders gone. Diggins has the inside track up the final hill, but Switzerland’s Nadja Kaelin is the only athlete still appearing to possess the ability to glide up the slope.
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Rounding the crest, they disappear from view. When they reemerge, it is Kaelin double-poling her way to third, followed by Norway’s Kristin Austgulen Fosnæs in fourth. Just five metres behind her, Diggins claws her way to fifth.
Her final effort is all she has. Swaying upright on her skis as she crosses the line, her body veering a little to the right, she collapses on the racing line as if sliced behind the knees. The only motion is her chest’s rise and fall. It is over.
Andersson is straight over, gently touching Diggins on the shoulder. Thirty seconds later, Kaelin has recovered enough to unclip the skis, which now awkwardly sit on her rival’s feet. Diggins is too exhausted to even unclasp her poles from her hands; all she can do is softly pat Kaelin on the calf in thanks. In the world Diggins has created, this is what it looks like to go out on your shield.
It is some five minutes before she is able to walk, but as she comes back to life, she picks out her father behind the ropes. “I’m so happy,” she tells him. Then a spark and a laugh. “ZERO KICK,” she intones.
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“If you had told me even a year ago that I’d be in the fight for a bronze medal in a 50k classic, I would not have believed you,” she elaborates to reporters soon after. “I can confidently say that I could not possibly have tried harder or gotten more out of my body. The fact I was able to come back and finish this race after getting so hurt just two kilometers into my Olympics? I’m just so grateful for the staff behind the scenes.
“I got to end it on a beautiful day and at a venue that I love so much. I’m just really proud of this last Olympics, really grateful, and really happy. I’m leaving here full of joy … and probably needing a new body.”
Diggins may not have finished with a medal, but this was an Olympic career that finished on her terms: unafraid to ask herself questions, journeying deeper than anyone else to find the answers, in a race of her own construction.
And surely she always knew, and probably hoped, that it would end like this; lungs and muscles emptied, breath slowly misting into the air, lying spread-eagled on the snow.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Olympics, Global Sports, Women’s Olympics
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