One Jessica Diggins is currently a semifinalist for the AAU James Sullivan Award, a prestigious honor that has been awarded annually to the top American collegiate or Olympic athlete for the past 93 years. Prior winners have included such obscure Olympians as Michael Phelps, Simone Biles, Michael Johnson, and Carl Lewis.
If you’ll pardon the editorializing, I think that you should vote for Jessie. You should do so for the complete set of Olympic medals, to be sure, and for what is now the double complete set of World Championships medals, and the top-two World Cup overall finish for the last three years running. And you may have heard something about an individual gold in Planica this spring.
But you should also vote for her because an athlete who could get effectively any endorsement she wants races with The Emily Program, an eating disorder treatment program, on her head, and her heart on her sleeve. And is a spokeswoman for Project RED‑S. And takes out her Olympic medals and passes them around and revels when little kids drop them. And is probably the main reason why the World Cup is coming to America this season.
Plus she is also, like, really good at skiing.
Find out more, and vote, here. You can vote once per day from now till July 19. Diggins is up against college football players whose fan bases are probably *slightly* larger than those for nordic skiing, so tell all your friends to vote each day, too. Go team.
(FYI this is not a sponsored post. U.S. Ski & Snowboard presumably does not mind that I am publicly backing this, and provided the header photo used above, but I wrote this of my own accord because I want to.)
— Gavin Kentch
