The new Diggins documentary is a crucible of elite sport and mental health

Two years ago, U.S. cross-country skiing star Jessie Diggins was battling a relapse of an eating disorder — an episode that she publicly acknowledged at the time.

What she didn’t share until now, though, was how close it came to derailing a year in which she won cross-country skiing’s season title and celebrated the return of the top-level World Cup circuit to the U.S., in her home city of Minneapolis.

In the middle of that winter, Diggins was still struggling enough that she went in for a scan in Norway to assess her body composition. The results, according to her longtime coach Jason Cork, were “shocking,” with too many red flags — so many that U.S. Ski Team staff was prepared to stop her from racing.

The previously undisclosed mid-season ordeal is featured in a new documentary about Diggins, “Threshold,” which will premiere nationally at the end of the Olympics.

The film doesn’t cover the specifics of what the body scan revealed, other than that important indicators were off. 

It depicts Diggins’ subsequent improvement, with support from family members who traveled to Europe to be with her during a scheduled Christmas break from racing.

But the documentary also underscores how persistently the eating disorder continued to plague Diggins after it emerged in her teens — through revealing conversations between her, her coaches and the filmmakers taped in hotel rooms as she traveled across Europe for races.

The U.S. Ski Team announced the film’s debut in a press release last week. 

Diggins is a longtime advocate for destigmatizing eating disorders through public discussion, and she’s written about her fight with bulimia in her autobiography, “Brave Enough.” She said at a news conference in Italy just before the start of the Olympics that she decided making the movie would be worth the cost to her privacy.

“I’m willing to put my story on the line to help change this,” she said. “I hope that it inspires people to have really critical conversations that can end up actually saving lives. And I hope that it inspires coaches to learn more about these serious illnesses and have resources handy to help the athletes that are under their care.”

The documentary’s release on the Peacock streaming service will be the culmination of three years of work by a pair of young cross-country ski racers-turned-filmmakers, brothers Torsten and Lars Brinkema, who, like Diggins, grew up in Minnesota. 

TV and movie star Patrick Dempsey, a Diggins fan and an avid skier, is an executive producer.

“Close to the edge”

Torsten and Lars Brinkema were 24 and 20 years old, respectively, when they first showed up at a U.S. Ski Team spring training camp in Oregon in 2023, Torsten said in a phone interview.

They’d come to film at the invitation of U.S. star Ben Ogden, whom Torsten had raced against on the university circuit when Ogden was competing for the University of Vermont and Torsten was at Colby College. 

Unlike other videographers who had done work with the team in the past, the brothers could actually keep up on skis and knew how to stay out of the way — making for an easy camaraderie with the athletes, Torsten said.

“I think we just weren’t very intimidating,” he said. “We were just these guys that were hanging out in the sun with our cameras.” 

On a ski with Diggins near the end of the camp, Torsten said, they talked through possibilities for further filming, particularly around Diggins’ upcoming home World Cup race.

“I think she also felt a level of trust pretty soon with us because we’re from Minnesota,” Torsten said. “On both sides, a light bulb kind of went off, thinking: If there’s any season to follow, it’s got to be this one.”

Thus began an odyssey that took the Brinkema brothers around the world with Diggins and the team, through a training camp in New Zealand and races in northern Scandinavia, Canada and Minneapolis. 

They considered other ideas for the structure of the project, including a Netflix-style docuseries on the team; a broader focus on the whole international World Cup circuit; and a narrative strand documenting Ogden grappling with the death of his father from cancer. 

In the end, though, fitting together an Ogden and Diggins narrative was too much for one movie, Torsten said. 

“We ended up picking Jessie’s and really going all the way with it,” he said.

While Diggins had spoken publicly about her relapse before the start of the 2023-2024 season shown in the film, the documentary reveals how she continued to struggle not just in the summer and fall but through the winter — even as she was racking up podium finishes. 

One coach, in the film, describes how Diggins had previously warned him about her ability to hide when she’s not doing well — and how he couldn’t trust what she was telling him at the time.

“She got very close to the edge,” Chris Grover, the U.S. cross-country program director, said in an interview. “It was incredibly stressful.”

In the film, another coach said the U.S. staff warned Diggins she was not going to continue to ski. 

“A hard message was delivered from a lot of people that really care about her,” Grover said in the interview.

But Diggins, he said, “got the message.” She spent the holiday recovering with her family and “did what she had to do to get back to a healthy space,” Grover said. 

After positive results from bloodwork and a bone scan, Diggins returned to racing after the winter break, won the Tour de Ski stage race and then went on to stand on the podium in one of the World Cup races in Minneapolis.

The filmmakers ended up with more than 15 interviews with Diggins, all of which were at least two hours — and 400 hours of footage total, Torsten said. 

Dempsey, the actor, joined the project after Diggins, knowing he was a fan of hers, sent him a message on Instagram on the Brinkema brothers’ behalf. They didn’t expect a response, Torsten said, but “he got back to her two minutes later and said, ‘Send the brothers to Maine!’”

“We showed up at his house and asked him to be a producer to help us navigate the film world,” Torsten said.

To pay for the work of transforming the raw material and race footage into a fully produced documentary, the brothers raised tax-deductible contributions in partnership with a Minnesota nonprofit that supports local filmmaking. Key financial support also came from one of Diggins’ main sponsors, an eating disorder treatment clinic called the Emily Program.

Diggins had approval power over the final version of the film, which Torsten described as “part of the trust” during the filmmaking process. She watched four different versions over a period of six or so months, mainly giving small notes about things like voiceovers, Torsten said.

Beyond streaming on Peacock, he said, a theatrical release is also planned, with hopes of debuting at this year’s end-of-season World Cup races in Lake Placid, New York. There’s also hope that the movie could play in markets in Europe, where Diggins has a sizeable fan base.

“It’s been three years of our life, and we could not be more proud that our debut feature film is about this sport that we grew up doing and this person that we’ve looked up to our whole life,” Brinkema said. “We’re stoked.”