It’s July, a time of year when Jessie Diggins, the greatest American to ever click on a pair of cross-country skis, is usually deep in her offseason training, the hours of roller skiing and running and strength of job he almost likes. as tearing through the snow in Norway in the middle of winter.
Something is wrong, though. He was feeling something he had never felt before — he just wasn’t sure he wanted to do it.
He was thinking about the upcoming season, the four months away from his wife, who was constantly tired, traveling to the “sick cave” for most of the race. In his 32 years on the planet, he’s never had to find motivation, never dreaded exercise, never wanted to do anything but push his body and mind to the brink of exhaustion.
It’s more complicated than that, though.
The eating disorder he battled in his youth and early in his career, a condition prevalent in his sport, is back. That shouldn’t happen. He thought he was done, something years of therapy had erased from his brain. But within a few weeks, he fought with her again.
And for the first time, he thought:
“I don’t have to do any of this.”
“I don’t need to win another race, as long as I live,” Diggins, a world champion and three-time Olympic medalist, said in the fall, recalling the feeling after his summer comeback.
For anyone who caught even a glimpse of Diggins’ career — it was likely that final, grueling sprint across the finish line at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics to win the US’s first gold medal in cross-country skiing — the idea that his brain reached the point where he considered walking away from ski racing is hard to fathom.
“THERE ARE THE DIGGINS!”
At the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics, Kikkan Randall and Jessie Diggins won @TeamUSAthe first Olympic gold medal in cross-country skiing.#BestOfTheDecade pic.twitter.com/Y8ZgqzBLzx
— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) December 28, 2019
There are few athletes who experience both training and competition with the joy that Diggins does. And it’s always been like this, in seasons — and offseasons — when he was nobody, and when he was an Olympic champion and the best skier in the world.
Here’s how Diggins, better known as a sprinter than a distance specialist, won his second medal at the Beijing Olympics — a silver in the 30-kilometer race — after a bout of food poisoning left it unclear whether he would even make it to the starting line. He pushed through the pain, set his sights on leading his team for one more day, and fought for a third Olympic medal after also winning bronze in the individual sprint earlier in Beijing.
Diggins did not make bail that day, and he did not make bail this summer. He will begin another season, his 14th, this weekend in Ruka, Finland.
But not because he wants to chase another chance to stand on the podium. That’s not why he raced that day in Beijing, after a night of sweating and puking. On the bus to the race, he read an email from his mother, who knew how sick he was, reminding him that he rode because he loved what he did, and he loved challenges, and who knows, it might be will be the best day. of his life.
Mom was right (except for the emergency medical intervention Diggins required afterward). But it wasn’t because he ended up with another medal. It was because it felt like a celebration of the community that drove him to this life.
There was the email from her mother, the conversations with her husband on the other side of the world, as she often did, offering her whatever support she could. Two teammates climbed into bed with him in the Olympic Village to help him rest. The wax technicians fixed his skis just right. His teammates and skiers from other countries, knowing how sick he was, trudged through the snow on the final climb, cheering him on as his body and brain began to shut down in the final kilometers.
“I feel like the whole world cheers me on,” he said last month during a 20-mile run in New York’s Central Park, his preferred interview setting.
The support this past summer, perhaps the most difficult of his adult life, was different, but no less affecting. He didn’t know what he was going to hear when he called his coaches and told them he was sick and didn’t know if he would be ready for the start of the season, if at all.
No one, he said, has issued a calendar or made a timeline for the return. They told him to take care of himself as best he could, ask for whatever he needed, and not do anything that would endanger his health. It was as if they didn’t care if he even raced.
That’s refreshing for Diggins, especially with all the questions elite athletes have raised in recent years about whether the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee sees them as medal-winning machines or people. The organization and its national governing bodies, which directly administer individual sports, strive to pay as much attention to athletes’ mental wellness as their physical health and offer psychological services that do not prioritize performance over sports.
“You want to live and compete both happily and healthy,” says Alex Cohen, a psychologist at the USOPC who works primarily with athletes in winter sports. “They hold hands.”
Diggins won silver in the 30km event in Beijing in 2022 — a marathon race that is not her specialty. Two medals in Beijing brought her Olympic career total to three. (Feng Kaihua/Xinhua via Getty Images)
That hasn’t always been so easy for Diggins, who has embraced every ounce of her position as a trailblazer and a role model, sometimes to her detriment.
He has a terrible time turning down requests to appear at schools or ski clubs, or anywhere else where there might be a child whose life could change. If she’s not raising money and awareness about eating disorders, she might be meeting with public officials to lobby them about climate change legislation. On the US ski team, she is not only the top performer but also a kind of captain/big sister/den mother for the girls and boys.
In retrospect, he said, the pressure he was putting on himself to fulfill all these roles perfectly was what made him come back.
“You can’t be perfect,” he said.
He knew that; even the best skiers lose, or rather, don’t win, most of their races. He just thought he was far from the obstacle that had caused so much trouble years ago, when he had put his health in jeopardy by depriving himself of food and vomiting.
Now she has to come to terms with the idea that bulimia is a part of her and probably always will be. That didn’t make him disappointed, that was how he felt for the first time. Just who he is.
“A little part of me that my brain has to watch over for the rest of my life,” he said.
As he worked through that idea in therapy, and his bloodwork showed he was healthy enough to train, his motivation began to return. He hasn’t lost his love of moving his body outdoors, or being part of a team, one reason he thrives on relays.
There’s another thing, too. At the end of a rare gold medal in 2018, his agent asked him what he wanted — a free trip to an exotic island; a fancy car?
He thought for a moment and decided what he really wanted was a World Cup cross-country race in Minnesota, where he grew up, the rare US region where Nordic sports are part of the culture. The World Cup circuit opens mainly in Northern Europe. Schlepping the entire sport to Minnesota could be difficult, his agent said.
But then the FIS, skiing’s world governing body, put the Minnesota race on the schedule — for March 2020. It was one of the first events canceled by the pandemic, but Minnesota is back on the schedule for this season , this time in February.
As a little girl, the only way Diggins could watch a World Cup race was on a VHS tape in her basement. What he would have given to see a local hero race the world’s best skiers in his backyard. Also, his grandparents haven’t seen his race in person since he was 19.
Diggins didn’t miss that — a chance to express himself and his passion for home in his own unique way, gliding and pulling himself through the snow, then crashing across a finish line.
“You’re sharing something of your soul with people,” she says of those moments, which, in a way, aren’t all that different from telling the world about her battles with bulimia, then and now. “You’re so vulnerable, you let everyone see you at your weakest. But then there’s something powerful about that, when you let people in that way.”
(Top photo of Diggins at the 2023 Nordic world championship: Daniel Karmann / picture alliance via Getty Images)
