Glitter, Knitting, and a Phone Call from Bill Koch: The U.S. Ski Team Is Ready for Lake Placid

This coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and A Hall Mark of Excellence Award. To learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award, or to learn how you can support FasterSkier’s coverage, please contact info@fasterskier.com.

Lake Placid, N.Y. — The eve of the World Cup finals at Mount Van Hoevenberg brought press conferences, sound checks that went sideways, and three American skiers who couldn’t stop making each other smile.

Jessie Diggins, Ben Ogden, and Gus Schumacher sat side by side Wednesday afternoon — the same trio that has turned the 2025-26 season into something U.S. cross-country skiing has never seen before. Between them: Olympic medals, historic podiums, a 50-year drought shattered, and one very good birthday cake.

But with three races left and Diggins’s retirement looming, the mood wasn’t heavy. It was loose, funny, and deeply human — exactly the way this team tends to do things.

“Probably Glitter”

Asked to define her legacy heading into her final World Cup weekend, Diggins did what Diggins does: she went somewhere unexpected.

“I think I define my legacy honestly, completely outside race results,” she said. “I am more proud of the things I have done off the course. I think my legacy is going to be in my advocacy and the way that I have spoken about mental health and eating disorders specifically, and the way I’ve tried to make really hard conversations less hard for people to have.”

She pointed to her work with Protect Our Winters and Share Winter, to the energy she’s poured into the team’s culture over the years. And then she landed the dismount.

“And probably glitter. I think there’s a lot more glitter in ski races now, and that’s always a great thing — as long as it’s biodegradable.”

Diggins has spent the season saying goodbye in pieces — a little cry leaving training camp in Bend, quiet moments at each World Cup stop. She knows what’s probably coming Sunday.

“I suspect it’s probably going to hit like a dump truck on Sunday, and there’s probably going to be a lot of tears.”

But she’s ready. And what she’s ready for is maybe the most Jessie Diggins thing of all: she sees ski racing as performance art, and she wants her final show to leave people wanting to go run up a mountain or sign their family up for ski lessons.

“I realized that I can do that moving forward, but just with my story and with my words, and I don’t have to push my body so hard, but I can still leave people inspired and motivated.”

In the meantime, she’s looking forward to being able to wash her clothes when they’re dirty, cook whatever she wants, and bake cookies on the weekend instead of training and racing all day.

“Your Life Is Not Going to Be the Same”

Ben Ogden grew up in Landgrove, Vermont. American skiing legend Bill Koch lived close by in Peru, Vermont. Same zip code, as Ogden puts it — “not so different.”

Fifty years separated Koch’s 1976 Olympic medal from Ogden’s silver this season, and when Ogden finally got on the phone with his neighbor and mentor after breaking the drought, Koch didn’t mince words.

“Bill just sort of said, ‘Hey, congratulations, and your life is not going to be the same from this point forward.’ And that was kind of crazy to hear.”

Ogden hopes to see Koch at the races this weekend. And racing at Van Hoevenberg carries its own weight for him — not just because of Koch, but because of his father, who was deeply embedded in the New England ski racing community.

“I think it’s really hard for me to come race in the U.S. and look around and not just, like, constantly think about him, because this was his scene,” Ogden said, his voice softening. “He would have been in such paradise on the side of the trail here in Lake Placid. And I’ll be thinking about him a lot this weekend, for sure.”

This is technically Ogden’s first home World Cup — he was sick for Minneapolis — and it’s hitting him right. He grew up racing the NYSEF Festival series at Lake Placid, bringing crews of Vermont kids over for slushy late-season races.

“It’s not my home, but it feels like it.”

Aspirations, Not Goals

Gus Schumacher has been doing some linguistic rebranding.

“I’ve been calling them aspirations for a few years now,” he said of his season targets, “because I feel like the pressure of goals was kind of weird for me.”

The distinction matters to Schumacher. He sets plenty of small goals — the daily, tactical kind — but the big ones, like winning an Olympic medal or finishing in the top 10 of the overall World Cup standings, he holds more loosely. They’re aspirations: things he wants, things he’ll chase, but things he won’t let crush him if they don’t happen.

“Those are things I want to do, but if they don’t happen, it won’t be because I didn’t try.”

He accomplished the Olympic medal. He entered this final weekend ranked sixth in the world, with a top-10 finish still in play. And he’s approaching Lake Placid the same way he approached Minneapolis, where he won his first World Cup in front of a hometown crowd: just be happy to be racing, and feed off the energy.

“Already today, it was really cool to have people cheering us on in the race prep, which doesn’t really happen much on the World Cup ever.”

Schumacher also dropped maybe the best origin story of the press conference: the formative moment that lit a fire under his career was Luke Jaeger beating him at an Anchorage cup race.

“That kind of put a fire under my belly to really start training, because I didn’t want him beating me anymore.”

The Knitting Club, the Water Pump, and the Greenhouse

The press conference’s best stretch might have been when someone asked the athletes how they decompress.

Schumacher keeps it clean: headphones, 10 to 20 deep breaths — four seconds in, eight seconds out. Standard operating procedure.

Ogden? He knits. And he’s not shy about it.

“After races, I’ve been doing a lot of knitting and stuff like that. Helps me just relax really quick.” After the season, it’s bigger projects: car work. “You can feel like you’re the king of the world after a couple medals, but go and try and replace a water pump on a Forerunner, and that’ll make you feel completely incompetent.”

Diggins revealed there was a full-on knitting club on the team this winter. Her own reset button is simpler: she calls her husband.

“He’s my absolute center of my world. The race could have been amazing, and it could have been also completely horrible. And we’re just talking about what I want to do with the garden, and how I want to start a greenhouse. And he’s like, ‘Uh huh, yeah, sure, I’ll support you in that.'”

One More Thing

Almost as a throwaway, Ogden mentioned that Andy Newell — “the original Nordic ski backflip guy” — is in Lake Placid this weekend. And Ogden himself has had a backflip dialed since he was 17.

“I’m hoping on Sunday we can kick up a little ski jump. I’m looking to take another one Sunday afternoon. So stay tuned.”

Three races to go. A retirement to honor. A culture to celebrate. And maybe a backflip.

It’s going to be a weekend.

 

Love Stories Like This? Help Keep Them Coming.

Feature stories like this one take time, access, and care to produce. If you value thoughtful storytelling and independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a Voluntary Subscriber. Your support directly fuels the work we do to cover the people, places, and moments that make our sport special.

Join the FasterSkier community!