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The final race before the 2025 Trondheim World Championships treated viewers at home and a sparse crowd Falun, Sweden to the very best of Mass Start skiing. After over fifty minutes of tactical pacing, relentless climbing, and breakneck descents, Jessie Diggins surged to crack a pack with which she had skied since the 1.6-kilometer mark—a dramatic, eleventh-hour masterclass that claimed her 25th individual World Cup win and 63rd individual podium. Heidi Weng (NOR) and home-soil star Ebba Andersson (SWE) finished 0.7 and 0.8 seconds behind Diggins; teammate Julia Kern led the Chase Group to take 6th place.
The Women’s 20 k Mass Start provided everything the avid ski racing fan might have hoped for: strategy, surprises, and suspense, culminating in seat-leaping final sprint. The opening 10 kilometers unfolded in the positional poetry of an 18th-century naval battle—with spandex-clad ships probing each other’s weaknesses, flanking and falling behind, slipping ahead and then stepping aside; steadily pushing the pace while awaiting the right moment to fire an anaerobic fusillade.
From the starting gun it was Diggins, Andersson, Victoria Carl (GER), and Weng trading the lead of a dense pack of skiers; notably absent was Distance Leader Astrid Øyre Slind (NOR), who withdrew an hour before the start due to an aggravation of her Celiac disease (according to Langrenn.com). On the first lap, no early leads emerged, and while the first ascent of the Mordarbaken—the course’s high-point and key climb, a 550-meter grind with 60 meters of vertical and grades approaching 16%—may have presaged a difficult day, a descending gap by the four frontrunners quickly disappeared.
By the 5.6k timecheck and the second time up Mordarbaken, Nora Sanness (NOR) had worked her way alongside Diggins, Andersson, Weng, and Carl. While Sanness appeared to test her skis through the ensuing downhills, she did not meaningfully separate.
The leading group continued to contain 17 women within seven seconds of one another through the 8-kilometer mark, including Americans Sophia Laukli in 9th and Julia Kern in 11th.
However, as the race neared the halfway point, the strain of the course’s long opening climbs—and a near-imperceptible acceleration from the (now five) frontrunners—gradually but decisively fractured the field. Andersson, Diggins, Carl, Sanness, and Weng crested Mordarbaken a third time (at 9.6k) within three seconds of each other, and five seconds ahead of the now-emerging Chase Group 1.
By the 11.4k timecheck, the gap against Chase Group 1 (led by Pia Fink (GER) and Flora Dolci (FRA)) had grown to 11 seconds; by the fourth Mordarbaken climb (at 13.6k), it had expanded to a likely-insurmountable 25 seconds. As Diggins continued to trade the helm with her four co-captains, Kern remained snug in Chase Group 1, while Laukli had fallen into a No-Man’s Land (11 seconds off Chase Group 1, and 32 seconds ahead of Chase Group 2).
At the 16-kilometer mark, viewers had enjoyed four laps of intelligent, technical Mass Start maneuvering, but had yet to see the sort of furious broadsides our earlier naval analogy would suggest.
Then, with one lap remaining, the fireworks began. Moments after leaving the stadium, Carl went down hard—planting her own pole directly into the top of her right ski, and tumbling into a ski-splaying, snow-spraying fall which Diggins narrowly dodged. Although Carl recovered relatively quickly, receiving a new pole from one of the Team USA coaches, the damage was done—the five had become four.
On the grinding pitches up, out of the stadium to the base of the Mordarbaken, the lead-changing and pace-testing continued with renewed intensity, trembling towards frantic as Swedish onlookers chanted “Ebba! Ebba! Ebba!” in a relentless tattoo. Midway up, Sanness ventured a breakaway but couldn’t open meaningful ground; the four leaders remained together over the final crest of the Mordarbaken with Diggins, the last of the group (and perhaps wary of sidestepping another fall), scrubbing speed through the opening descent before regaining contact.
Two “Sprint Hills” —overlapping with Friday’s Sprint course—remained. At the base of Sprint Hill One, Diggins launched the first true attack of the race, lunging towards the front of the group. Weng responded on a hair-trigger, marking Diggins’ move—but too closely! The Norwegian stepped on Diggins’ pole basket mere feet from the top of the climb; for a moment, both skiers staggered, in danger of falling; the front four reeled! In a gasp, their skis were back beneath them, and the four leaders stumbled on with no change in position but no gap opened—frantic smoke, but no fire!
They plunged to the base of Sprint Hill Two, scarcely a kilometer remaining, Diggins leading by a hairsbreadth. She cast a glance over her shoulder and broke into a jump-skate on the inside of the trail’s lefthand arc, gaining at most a desperate meter on her three pursuers—and then hesitating, her tempo dropping, her meter seized and then lost in the space of second! Another attack, foiled!
Andersson, avatar of the screaming spectators, matched Diggins on the outside; the Swede devoured the scant distance between them and lunged towards the crest; towards, perhaps, another win—but Diggins was not finished. A second sharp look behind and the American erupted into another jump-skate—a huge move, the move; the roaring cannonade we were waiting for since the starting pistol—Diggins was away; she was over the top and hurtling down towards the stadium, with Andersson, Weng, and Sanness completely off-guard and now precious fractions of a second behind. They hurtled after her, matching her deep tuck and then her signature free-skate as the trail leveled off, then clutched at her with powerful V2s over the rolling trail-crossing and into the final downhill, the final corner.
Diggins was low; her skis were, perhaps, just fast enough to carry her home. Weng pulled ever so slightly ahead of Andersson and the two were both upright, surging, pummeling the snow with their poles, as Diggins remained in that final, nail-bitingly-long tuck and free-skate. Then Diggins was up and poling, too, at the absolute last impulse of her momentum—had the race been ten meters longer, it seemed, the Scandinavians would have reclaimed her.
But it wasn’t, and they didn’t.
Diggins crossed the line in 54:27.4, with Weng in second and Andersson in third, each less than one second behind her. Sanness took fourth, 5.9 seconds back; Carl, finishing between the leaders and Chase Group 1, finished fifth, 27.2 seconds back. And, in sixth place—absent from the leader-focused cameras for the final kilometers of the race, but now outsprinting Fink and Dolci at the front of Chase Group 1—Julia Kern!
Rounding out the American squad, Sophia Laukli was 16th; Alayna Sonnesyn and Sydney Palmer-Leger were 25th and 26th, respectively.
Reached for comment by this outlet, Kern stated that the American Women entered today’s race energized, inspired, and cognizant of the determinative Mordarbaken.
“We were nervously watching the Men’s race and so amped by Gus [Schumacher]’s result, and it looked like the skis were running really well, so we were really excited when we headed out,” Kern said. “My plan was to be as far up in the front as possible. I knew that on the big ‘Murder-baken’ things would start to string out and gaps would form, so I really tried to be in good position.”
Executing this plan was hard-fought. “I honestly didn’t feel as good today as I did yesterday, but I just knew and told myself—‘You will recover, you just need to hang on, every [climb].’ I was in the Chase Pack, just hanging on for dear life and on the ropes, frankly, for a lot of the race, but I had amazing skis. Coming into the Sprint Course I was able to ski [past] the pack and found this extra gear and energy; my sprint legs kicked in […] and had an incredible finish, catching the two girls, Pia [Fink] and Flora [Dolci] who had skied away, actually, on the Mordarbaken.”
“It was so cool to see Jessie win, and Gus on the podium, and overall our techs just crushed the skis. For me, it was just—‘Believe, keep hanging on’—and then waiting for the Sprint Course because that’s where I felt most confident and most excited to make my move.”
Diggins, interviewed by FIS ahead of her podium appearance, told a similar story of pacing, persistence, and team inspiration.
During the Men’s race, she said, “Julia and I were jumping up and down screaming at the TV. It definitely got me really excited and really sweaty, and warmed up for the race.”
“I really like this course. To be totally honest, I was starting to cramp up, and if the fourth lap had gone a little faster I probably would have been off the back”—but she held on to “see what happens.” Diggins, too, credited speedy skis for her decisive surge. “Huge congrats to the wax techs. They’ve been working super hard all weekend,” and their work—and the American performances today—will set the tone going into the World Championships.
“This was a win for the whole truck and the whole team—it’s awesome momentum going into Trondheim.”
Complete Women’s Freestyle Mass Start RESULTS
Luke Dykowski
Luke Dykowski is an alumnus of the University of Minnesota Nordic Ski Club ‘22, and is the Founder and Nordic Coordinator of the Midwest Collegiate Ski Association. He is currently a law student at Georgetown University.
