For Olympians, a medal changes your life ‘overnight.’ Here’s how it changed Ben Ogden’s.

PREDAZZO, ITALY — Ben Ogden, the U.S. cross-country skier, was ready to celebrate his historic Olympic silver Tuesday with his signature backflip off the podium.

But there was a problem: He had to pee.

After Ogden won the first men’s medal in cross-country skiing in a half-century, doping testers needed a urine sample. So, he did the obvious thing and “drank, like, three bottles of water, immediately,” he said.

The need to relieve himself, he said, was probably the biggest concern on his mind as he contemplated the backflip while the podium ceremony played out. “When I was standing up there, I definitely reconsidered a couple of times,” he said.

Ogden went for the backflip anyway. Afterward, he still had to walk through a maze of reporters called the mixed zone, where — unlike at non-Olympic races — everybody wanted to talk. Then straight to a news conference, and finally, a wait when he arrived at doping control: The other medal-winners had already arrived.

“It was really, honestly, pretty miserable. I haven’t had to pee that bad since I was a little kid on a road trip,” Ogden said. “I didn’t really realize the whole situation after you get a medal at the Olympics.”

But Ogden wasn’t complaining.

At a reporter’s request, he was laying out the specifics of what happens in the hours and days immediately following something that many athletes dream of but few actually experience: winning an Olympic medal.

In a conversation Friday at his hotel in Italy — outdoors, to minimize infection risk from a reporter who has been outside the U.S. team’s bubble — Ogden described a phone deluged with messages and a dayslong-sprint of interviews and TV appearances over Zoom. But he also took time the day of the medal to enjoy a sauna with some teammates he’s known for years. He said the time in the sauna was important because it gave him time to process an accomplishment that all of them have aspired to but just one of them has achieved.

“If you win an Olympic medal, it’s like your life changes overnight,” said Jessie Diggins, one of the three other American cross-country skiers in history who can relate to Ogden’s medal-winning experience. “Which is really cool, but it’s a lot of pressure, and it’s a lot of obligations that come afterward.”

She added: “I’m just really proud of him for taking in all of the energy that comes in surrounding that.”

“The toll is real”

Ogden, 26, has had a few podium finishes on the World Cup against Olympic-level competition. But the Vermonter was far from a lock for a medal in Tuesday’s sprint race, where he was nearly eliminated after failing to place in the top two in his semifinal heat and only advanced to the final as a “lucky loser” based on his finish time.

In the finals, though, he made a powerful charge up the final hill and finished trailing only Johannes Høsflot Klæbo of Norway, who’s won all three cross-country events in Italy so far and is widely seen as the greatest athlete his sport has ever produced.

The result was huge not just for Ogden but for his teammates and the American staff – a large group of athletes stayed at the race trails to congratulate him and attend the medals ceremony.

For some of those athletes, the thrill of Ogden’s medal and their proximity to it left them so exhausted that they scaled back their own workouts the next day, said Chris Grover, the U.S. cross-country’ team’s director.

“It really hit them not only emotionally, but it hit them physically,” he said in an interview Thursday.

The impact on teammates, Grover added, underscores that for Ogden himself, “the toll is real.”

One example: The night of the medal, Ogden said, “it was incredibly hard to wind down, just thinking about everything.” It took until 2 a.m. to fall asleep, and by 7 a.m., he was wide awake, with a “crazy” schedule of media appearances — including Good Morning America, on ABC.

All Ogden had to drink the night before was a little champagne. Still, on TV, he said, “I had some bags under my eyes, I was pretty tired, I hadn’t shaved. And I was looking at myself in the camera and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to tighten it up a little bit.’”

“I’m sure that they all wanted me to say I was out drinking and carrying on. And I didn’t say that,” he said. “But they probably thought I was, based on how I looked.”

The cross-country team’s press officer, Leann Bentley, coordinated the string of media appearances. She also helped Ogden draft an Instagram post that, he said, was hard to compose.

“It’s so overwhelming to think of all the people who you want to thank,” Ogden said. “You’re just like, ‘Oh, my God, there’s too many. It’s so hard.’”

As for the phone? Ogden had left it in his backpack in the hours immediately following the race. When he picked it up, initially, there were so many messages coming in that it made it difficult to find the threads he needed to use to communicate with his ski technician and his mother.

“Their text exchanges just get buried, immediately,” he said. “Then you start pinning them — but all of a sudden you have 10 pinned messages and that gets confusing. So, I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of important stuff.”

A meeting with Bernie?

On Friday, Ogden was expected to be one of the U.S. team’s four starters in the next Olympic cross-country event, the 10-kilometer freestyle, and he wanted to race.

But amid the intensity of the medal-winning experience, U.S. staff encouraged him to stand down, according to Grover, the team’s director. “He’s just had so much emotion,” Grover said. “And there’s been a lot of media.”

Ogden has traditionally been stronger in shorter distances. And the upcoming relay race Sunday — with four 7.5-kilometer legs — and the team sprint scheduled for Wednesday represent “really big opportunities for us,” Grover said.

Ogden, nonetheless, was keen to race Friday, in spite of his coaches’ position.

“They don’t ever make decisions for us. But I think that was the closest I’ll ever get to them telling me they’re not going to start me. They were really adamant that they wanted me to sit it out,” he said. “You kind of train a lot, and you’re trying to put yourself in good shape — and then when you are, it’s nice to race.”

Since those conversations, though, Ogden acknowledged that he’s “crashed a little bit, energy-wise — as they sort of speculated would happen.”

“You can only ride a high for so long before it comes down,” he said. Skipping the event, he added, was ultimately a “good call,” given the upcoming team events.

In the days since the medal, Ogden said, he hasn’t had much time to consider what it means, and how it might affect him. But he did acknowledge that his view of himself and where he sits in his sport has “changed, a little bit.”

Earlier in his career, Ogden said, he felt some awkwardness in describing himself as a “professional skier.” “You’re not getting paid. You’re not really making money, you don’t have results to show for it, too much,” he said. “It’s kind of hard to believe it.”

He added: “Over the years, as you get more established, it starts to be easier. And I think now, it will be really easy.”

Nonetheless, Ogden still has no agent. And no companies have landed in his inbox pitching endorsement deals — unless, he added, they’re in his DMs and he hasn’t seen them yet.

More than anything else, he said, his “peak goal” is leveraging his medal into some time with Bernie Sanders, the populist U.S. senator and former presidential candidate from Ogden’s home state.

“And I really want to meet him and talk to him, too. Not just, like, a handshake,” Ogden said.

“I know it’s political and everything else. But Bernie is just an ambassador for Vermont, and has been for so long. And he’s been someone who I’ve looked up to and respected, and I just couldn’t ask him — he’s a busy man,” Ogden said. “But I think maybe now — maybe now — I can take this medal and figure out a way to meet him.”