Jessie Diggins Teaches Us How to Endure

This Sunday, a lesser-heralded chapter of American history will close when Jessie Diggins enters her final World Cup event. She will leave the sport at the absolute top of her game, for the fourth time as the overall Crystal Globe winner, having slogged it out over a season that began the day after Thanksgiving above the Arctic Circle in Finland and will end 33 races later right here in Lake Placid, NY. She is the only skier, male or female, to compete in every single individual competition this year, from sub-three-minute sprints to two-plus hour marathons, before throngs of beer-guzzling fans in the sun and to empty Teutonic stadiums in the spritzing January rain.

During the run-up to the Milan Olympics, she briefly returned to the national zeitgeist, hyped for her ability to dig into the pain cave, and seen writhing on the ground beyond the finish line, a paroxysm of gasping. A high school student of mine had seen the feature on her in the New York Times, and a room of young athletes in Greenwich, CT — alien to Nordic ski culture — spent the full English class discussing the efficacy of pushing one’s limits. People around the once skilliterate Westchester County even started making the connection of why I’d named my dog “Diggins.”

During her first Olympic race this year, Diggins crashed in traffic on the slushy snow and bruised her ribs. So naturally, five days later, she gritted her way to a bronze in the 10-kilometer freestyle and to 5th in the 50-kilometer classic on the final day of the Games. But just a week after this, when the collective gaze had drifted from the luge and returned to the Epstein files, she came improbably, from back in the field to within 0.1 second of winning a 20-kilometer in Falun. I watched this tuck-skate drag race with my daughter, who has a Diggins poster on her wall, and we screamed so loud the neighbors asked if everything was okay.

Against the slow off-gassing of rage coming across the airwaves — the sex trafficking, the elementary school bombing, the painful erosion of dignity and competence — Diggins has given us an important antidote all these years. In early 2021, when insurrectionists were sprawling their feet and flag across Nancy Pelosi’s office, Diggins was on her way to winning her first Tour de Ski. I remember the Alpe Cermis climb, when she crested into view in her red, white, and blue race suit, and thinking that she, too, is a compatriot. This past January, when her native Minnesota had become an epic fury, she won her third Tour de Ski title and was entering her fourth Olympics. She wrote, “For everyone out there caring for others, protecting their neighbors, and meeting people with love — every single step is for you. YOU are the ones who make me proud to carry the flag, and I hope I can bring you joy over these next few weeks.”

When she won Olympic gold with Kikkan in 2018, she was suddenly in the spotlight. Unfamiliar territory for our stoic sport whose only other American medalist to that point was Bill Koch, who won silver a half-century prior, and retreated into the moss of Vermont. But she was on the Wheaties box, and on commercials for Chipotle, Salesforce, Deliotte, and Toyota. She gave countless Swift-like appearances to throngs of impressionable youth; she lobbied in Washington D.C. for climate change reform. They found out her team nickname was “Sparkle Chipmunk,” and her pre-race glitter applications became her meme. She choreographed music videos; she shared homemade baked goods during the five-month-long European exodus. And she infected a hunger-based confidence that vaulted our underfunded, lowly squad to rival the Scandinavian powerhouses. Proclaimed as “the face of American skiing” and “America’s sweetheart,” she shouldered all this as she simultaneously maintained the fitness to train and race to her own world-best standards.

But as she reveals in the excellent, newly-released documentary about her called “Threshold” (with screenings all weekend at Lake Placid’s Palace Theater), the pressure of doing this day-in, day-out, for six solid years, got to her. As she tells the movie camera, it reacquainted her with senior year of high school: “I was trying to go 100 percent into every single corner of my life because I couldn’t sit still with the feeling that I was not enough.” In 2023, she relapsed with her eating disorder. In the film, she narrates this journey with a raw earnestness that, like her approach to skiing itself, cuts right to the marrow. “I’m willing to put my story on the line to help change this,” she says.

Those of us who recall her first U.S. National title, back in 2011, among the paper mill aromas of Rumford, ME, fold this into our meta-narrative of triumph over challenge. Where others stand tall and firm on their skis, like maestros conducting their symphonies, Diggins hides none of the pain. Her head bobs, her shoulders undulate, her breathing seems louder than anyone else’s. She’s dropped off the back of the pack and yet somehow, she finds something. She’s not done. Here comes Diggins! If she can do it, I can do it.

This winter, I was particularly attuned to Diggins because, after two partial knee replacements, I was trying to claw my way back into competitive skiing. There were no Toyota endorsements at stake for me, but it was enough to re-connect with the core of this sport. Yes, it’s a beautifully nurturing, soul-susurrating exercise, but climbing up a hill deep into a race, it’s really just about holding off an explosion. The lack of oxygen excites my imagination and it’s all I can do to stay quiet and suppress the inevitable voices saying no, it’s too hard, this guy ahead of me is probably a wonderful father, it’s ok.

Who can say for sure what’s inside the mind of Diggins as she enters this state, this tribute of her current to her source that she has alchemized into fist-pumping, tear-jerking frenzy? But I know that the highlight reels she has brought us over her 15-year career – breaking a pole and scrambling with one arm to her first World Championship gold in 2013, finishing gloveless with a bloody face in 2023 (after another pole incident) and still earning silver, collapsing the day after food poisoning to win silver in the 2022 Olympics – this is something that should give the nation pride. She tells us, “I want to cross that finish line and I want to be so tired that I can’t even stand up, so that I know I gave everything in my heart toward my very best effort.” And she speaks with her actions.

We project our own wish fulfillment onto our heroes, and for the run of her career, with its 365 World Cup starts — more than anyone in history — Diggins has sturdily and gracefully absorbed our collective desires. Now she is leaving on her terms, from the top step of so many podiums, a master of her time.

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