Jessie Diggins didn’t have all her poles or gloves. Rosie Brennan didn’t have all her energy. But after 55 minutes of cutthroat racing they both ended up in the same place: on the podium of the 20-kilometer mass start skate race in Ruka.
Diggins was second and Brennan third, the latter making the podium for the second day in a row in this opening weekend of the 2023/2024 World Cup season. Moa Ilar of Sweden won the race in 55:40.8, with Diggins 0.3 seconds back and Brennan another 0.9 seconds behind her.
It was cold in Finland on Sunday morning, cold and fast. Athletes covered eight laps of a 2.5-kilometer course, with steep climbs and long downhills. Through the first two laps there was scant separation, with the top 28 women still within 10 seconds of the lead, and more athletes than that still all skiing together.
Then Diggins decided it was time to start pushing. She was in eighth at the 5km mark, within three seconds of the lead. At the next time checkpoint, 800 meters later, she was leading the race.
At the same time Rosie Brennan, yesterday’s headliner for the American squad, was moving backwards quickly, suddenly finding herself in 25th overall. There were still 15 kilometers’ worth of racing left to go, but also finding yourself 15 seconds off the lead at any point in a race, with two dozen athletes between you and the leader, on a sharply pitched course with few relatively flat sections (“8 hill climbs,” as Katherine Stewart-Jones titled her Strava for the day), is not good, either.
But — foreshadowing here — not counting out the American women was the theme of the day. Diggins continued drilling it at the front; she would stay within two to three seconds of the lead for virtually the entire race. You can see her represented by a dark blue line with a diamond icon, down near the very bottom of this race visualization from FIS.
The light blue square, meanwhile, the one effecting not so much a brief detour from the bottom of the y-axis as a full-on frolic through the upper reaches of this graph, would be Rosie Brennan. 15 seconds out at 5.8km? 22 seconds out at 6.1km? 13 seconds out at halfway? Still 13 seconds out at the 16.1km mark of a 20km? This is not how coaches would advise most athletes to race a 20-kilometer mass start. But then again, Rosie Brennan is not most athletes, not to mention that she has effectively crafted her entire career out of showing up after people had counted her out.
The only performance on Sunday more remarkable than Brennan’s came from her teammate. At a little past 18.6 kilometers into the race, another athlete skiing in a tight-knit pack inadvertently stepped on Diggins’s pole. [Update: It was Ebba Andersson, and she felt really bad about it.] Diggins’s right pole came off. Her right glove came off. Diggins was now skiing in the throes of a World Cup mass start race, at a ferociously fast pace, in single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures, with one pole and one bare hand. There were less than four minutes of race time remaining till the finish line.
Diggins got another pole relatively quickly, following some all-time prescience by U.S. coach Kristen Bourne, who had positioned herself in the right place at the right time courseside with a spare in advance of the incident. But the process of providing an on-course athlete with a replacement pole is an awkward, high-speed ballet under the best of conditions; Diggins was struck in the face with the replacement pole during the handoff. She now had two poles, one glove, and a bloody face. The finish line loomed.
The following pole handoff and resulting finish sprint will probably feature in Diggins’s career highlight videos, so you should watch it now. (I’m going with the U.S. Ski Team embed here rather than the FIS one, since it’s got more Chad and Kikkan on the soundtrack and less Imagine Dragons.)
Jessie Diggins’s palmarès (a list of a racer’s career accomplishments) is sterling by any measure. Within the much smaller tranche of races in which she has prominently raced without a pole for some time… her track record is pretty darn good. Take a quick look at her final leg in the skate team sprint at 2013 World Championships in Val di Fiemme. This video should be cued up to start at just around the one-minute mark:
This video is from a long time ago now. Diggins’s Salomon skate boots are still in the black and white colorway, and her poles are One Way, back when One Way poles were yellow, not orange. So some things are different, but some things are still the same: she skis so smoothly that it takes the commentators roughly 15 seconds to realize that she is down a pole. She is promptly handed a replacement (albeit like a men’s classic pole that may literally be taller than she is). She straps on the new one while freeskating on the flats (again, all this while skiing at her absolute max on her third of three legs in a team sprint). She drops the rest of the field on a climb, then hands off to Kikkan in first at the final exchange. Randall solos away from Sweden over the anchor leg to win by nearly eight (!) seconds, and Diggins is a world champion at age 21.
So I spill a lot of ink on these pages talking about Brennan’s career longevity and perseverance, but Diggins has been at this for a while, too — think for a moment about where you were in life in February 2013, and compare it to the present day. That’s a long time ago now.
Back in November 2023, the pack was hurtling toward the finish line. Brennan adroitly kept her position at the front of the race. Diggins obtained a second replacement pole in a more appropriate length, strapped it over her bare hand (again: it was roughly 5 above out there), and began methodically, somehow, moving back up through the pack over the limited real estate remaining. It would be an exaggeration to say that blood was “streaming” down her face, but her mien was by this point notably sanguine.
At the base of the final climb to the finish, Diggins is in fourth. I am trying to be objective here, but that is frankly staggering. Moa Ilar of Sweden is by far the strongest going up the hill the final climb. Brennan is gamely in the hunt, but Diggins’s V1 is faster. Ilar narrowly gets to the inside first around the final curve, and leads Diggins and Brennan into the finish in that order. Two seconds behind them, three women threw their skis for fourth, Lotta Udnes Weng taking the photo finish over Ebba Andersson and Frida Karlsson.
Diggins writhes on the ground, pretty darn deservedly. She has a Swix Triac 4.0 pole on her gloved left hand, and a Swix Triac 3.0 pole on her bare right hand. They say it doesn’t hurt when you win, but I would suspect that her right hand hurt a lot at that moment.
It is Moa Ilar’s first career World Cup win, with perhaps a small assist from absent teammate Maja Dahlqvist’s borrowed skis. It is Diggins’s 48th career World Cup podium, and Brennan’s ninth (also, Brennan’s second in two days). It is the first time that two Americans have been on the podium together since, well, Diggins was first and Brennan was third in the 20km interval-start skate in Davos last December. These women are good at skate races. And at being tough.
Here are your top-10 World Cup overall standings after the first weekend of racing. Sweden has six out of the top eight, but America has two out of the top three.
“First of all, I’m doing okay,” Diggins began her post-race comments in audio shared with multiple media outlets. It “looked a little bit rugged at the finish. And I just want to say a huge thank you to our team and to the FIS team; they took really good care of me.”
“I had to dig really, really deep for that one,” Diggins continued. “And I was just pretty cold and tired at the finish, but I’m all good now.
“But it was exciting out there. I lost a pole, and my glove with it, with about one and a half kilometers to go. I got a replacement pole, got a pole smash to the face, and apparently kind of pretty bloody mouth, and finished the race with a spare pole. And it was pretty exciting.”
Diggins added, “I’m proud of myself for just never giving up and digging deep. And it was so special to share that podium with Rosie, and Sophia had a great race too. I’m literally watching and cheering for our boys right now, and it’s just really exciting. Our techs have been working so, so hard, and I’m very thankful to them, because you don’t get podiums or good races without the whole team supporting you, and they’ve done an amazing job and I’m very thankful. So I’m just happy to be here, and excited to have gotten the season underway.”
“I’m feeling great about this weekend,” Brennan said in audio shared with multiple media outlets. “It’s always good to start out with some podiums. I think my training this summer was good, and I feel like I’m in good shape. And so I hope to keep the momentum rolling, and carry it on to a good season.”
Turning to the race, “It was super fun to race with Sophia and jessie for a lot of the race today,” Brennan observed. “And then to be on the podium with Jessie is always good. It’s just fun to share these big moments with your teammates. It makes it super rewarding and fun, and adds to good vibes on the team and helps us carry good momentum forward.”
Brennan turned more introspective on the subject of what this weekend means for her, and on where she finds motivation:
“I’m someone that’s very much not motivated by the attention,” she said. “Honestly, I kind of dread it. It’s not my favorite part of why I do this. I just love the challenge of trying to improve and working on all the the small things that I can do to get better, and then testing myself and seeing if it works. And that kind of process is what’s motivating for people.
“So I’m definitely motivated by this weekend. I think it gives me confidence that my training the summer was really good, and that I made some good technical improvements and things are headed in the right direction. So that’s definitely motivating. And, of course, I’m glad to see it show up in the results. And I hope to continue to do that, and I hope that I can portray my best self in the media and my true self, because I think that’s really important, too. That I am who I am, and that’s good.”
There were, in fact, other athletes in this race, and I apologize for not talking about them yet. Sophia Laukli was 14th (+14.2), Novie McCabe was 21st (+2:02.4), Julia Kern was 26th (+2:13.6), and Alayna Sonnesyn was 34th (+4:58.8). Yes it says something telling about the last decade of skiing in this country that the Americans put five women in the top 30 and three in the top 14, and I didn’t even mention that fact until 2,000 words into this article.
But this team is in fact more than just Jessie or Rosie, so I wanted to be sure to ask someone else about their race, too. Sonnesyn has spoken candidly on social media this week about combatting the sniffles and not feeling at her best, and I was curious how a non–U.S. Ski Team athlete (read: Sonnesyn is paying for all of this out of pocket, either personally or through her sponsors) balances concerns over racing sick, something that athletes pretty universally try to avoid, with the unfortunate reality that said athlete also has a strong incentive to log results in Period 1 that will lead to her getting more World Cup starts in Period 2.
Here’s Sonnesyn on that dynamic, via writing to Nordic Insights:
“It was a huge bummer to get sick earlier this week as I had really been looking forward to these races in Ruka! I spent Tuesday–Thursday horizontal, did an easy ski Friday and some threshold intervals Saturday to test the body. I was taking it day by day, hour by hour and making decisions with my coaches back home based on how I was feeling. I did everything I could to come back for this 20k skate as it’s one of my favorite races on the calendar and after feeling in a pretty good place this morning decided to go for it.
“It made me so happy! It wasn’t the best race of my life but I was out there doing it and with so much joy to be there… the heart is happy but hungry for more. And so stoked to see the other USA ladies absolutely crush it!”
World Cup racing continues in Gällivare, Sweden, next weekend with a 10km interval-start skate race on Saturday, then men’s and women’s relays (4 x 7.5km, classic/classic/skate/skate) on Sunday.
— Gavin Kentch
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