Jessie Diggins has quietly become, post-Johaug, the most consistent 10km skate athlete in the world. The rest of the American team isn’t doing that badly, either.
Sunday morning in Östersund, the third weekend of the 2023/2024 World Cup season, saw Diggins take her second consecutive victory in a 10-kilometer interval-start skate race, and her eighth consecutive podium in this format. The last time that Diggins finished off the podium in this event was in Lillehammer in December 2021, slightly over two years ago now. Russian athletes were in that race, for perspective. Therese Johaug was in that race. No one else in the current women’s World Cup field has matched this streak since, which memorably includes a gold medal in 2023 World Championships in Planica.
And by the way, Rosie Brennan was fifth on Sunday even on an off day and Sophia Laukli was eighth, a non–Alpe Cermis career best for the 23-year-old Mainer. This team is skiing very well right now, to put it mildly.
Sunday’s 10-kilometer interval-start skate saw athletes cover three laps of a 3.3km course. Diggins raced it with the extremely subtle approach of skiing nearly every discrete section of the course faster than everyone else and, by a considerable margin, leading at every individual checkpoint. Save the late-race splits drama for someone else; this is more of a metronome at the front.
I can walk you through the math on this, but this is really more of a picture being worth a thousand words situation: Bluntly put, Jessie Diggins had her way with a world-class field. For the second weekend in a row.
As the line graph shows, Diggins had already put 3.5 seconds on the nearest podium finisher, Heidi Weng of Norway (who is also, like, a really good skier), within the first kilometer of the race. The gap grew to 8.4 seconds at 2.8km before shrinking slightly within the race’s first half, down to 4.8 seconds by the 4.8km mark.
But it only exploded from there. Diggins put massive amounts of time into the field over the race’s second half to win going away. If you delve into the live timing, it shows that no athlete was ever closer than Ebba Andersson, who was 1.4 seconds back at the 2.1km mark. Andersson would later pay for her fast start by finishing ninth overall.
Diggins’s winning margin by the finish was 23.0 seconds, ahead of Weng in second and Victoria Carl of Germany in third (+29.1). If that time gap sounds familiar, it’s because last weekend in Gällivare Diggins was 23.1 seconds ahead of Andersson when she ran away with the win.
Simple math suggests that the rest of the field is currently gaining on Diggins at the rate of 0.1 seconds per race. It will therefore take them another 230 races to catch up. Rounding up slightly and assuming four 10km interval-start skate races per year, someone other than Diggins will next win this race format again in 2081. Your move, Statistical Skier; I see no problems whatsoever with this analysis.
And by the way: Rosie Brennan, in fifth, and Sophia Laukli, in eighth, also joined Diggins in the top ten. (Is the U.S. the new Norway? Discuss.) Brennan was 47.5 seconds back at the finish; as you can see in the line graph she was closer through the first half of the race, then, like the rest of the field, lost some time over the second half en route to finishing “only” fifth. On an off day with a suboptimal ski choice.
Brennan has now finished 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 9th in her first six individual races to start this season. There is a reason that she is ranked second in the overall World Cup standings, behind only Diggins in first. Third through seventh in those standings (plus tenth) are Swedish women; the only Norwegian in the top 10 is Lotta Udnes Weng in eighth. If the new distaff Norway isn’t the U.S., it is Sweden.
Laukli’s eighth place finish today (59.7 seconds back of Diggins, 2.9 seconds back of Anne Kjersti Kalvå for seventh) is the best World Cup finish of her career on a course that does not include a 418-meter hors catégorie climb (yes I know this isn’t actually cycling, bear with me here). Laukli was third and fifth up Alpe Cermis in the last two editions of the Tour de Ski. She also had an eighth place time of day in a pursuit in last year’s Tour de Ski, but I’m with Devon Kershaw that those aren’t real.
[read and listen more: Who Woke Me Up? Episode 5: Sophia Laukli figures things out]
Julia Kern was 29th today, finishing 2:09.8 back of Diggins. Alayna Sonnesyn was 32nd (+2:13.4), her best result of this season and a top-three World Cup distance result for her career. Novie McCabe was slated to race but did not start.
“Today was for the boys,” Diggins said to open her post-race comments to multiple media outlets. “That was so cool. I was incredibly motivated and so fired up and just so overwhelmed with the joy and passion of sport yesterday. Seeing Ben and JC make their first ever final, together, and seeing them like fist bump across the line, like, We made it. And then seeing JC get on the podium. That was so cool. It was one of the coolest things ever, honestly.”
“Also I was very proud of how Rosie and I skied,” Diggins added; not to humorlessly close read this, but this was the only line of her post-race remarks focused on herself.
“But this was all about the boys this weekend,” Diggins continued. “And then this morning, seeing Johnny [Steel Hagenbuch] have his career-best results and get a nice big hug from him before my race, that was just extra motivation. So it’s been really, really cool to just try to build on the team atmosphere.”
Diggins turned slightly more introspective in her comments to Nordic Insights; I wanted to check back in on how she is doing, following her fairly soul-baring interview just ahead of this season.
“I’ll be honest,” Diggins said to NI. “I’m homesick; I miss Wade so much” (her husband, Wade Poplawski, a Canadian national by birth who continues to battle visa issues. If you’ve got an in with USCIS or the U.S. State Department, please be in touch. That’s not a joke.)
“It’s hard to be on the road and away from your husband and your family and all the nice little routines of being in your own home,” Diggins continued. “But at the same time, I’m really proud of this team and how we’ve pulled together and had a lot of game nights, had a lot of team activities. I think we do a very good job at working hard to make a home on the road where we are. And so I would say I’m just really appreciative of this team and how we’ve pulled together, and that makes it all just that little bit easier.”
“Not my best feelings,” Rosie Brennan wrote on Instagram of a day when she finished fifth in the world. Sometimes in endurance sport you feel unstoppable, and like you can do anything. Sometimes you feel like you can’t ski your way out of a paper bag. The vast majority of days fall somewhere in the middle, where you do the best you can with what you have. For Brennan, today, that was good for her fourth top-five finish of the season.
“Today was a decent race,” said Brennan in measured comments to multiple media outlets. “I definitely was battling the whole time. I didn’t maybe feel like my best self, but felt reasonably strong. I think I made a mistake in picking the wrong skis, so I was definitely struggling a little bit getting the speed that I wanted. But I fought the whole way and ended up with an okay result, so I’m cool with it.”
Brennan has used this phrase, “feeling like my best self” or “being the best version of myself I can be,” or something along those lines, multiple times this season, including above. So I asked her about this concept, and what it means to her. Here’s Brennan to Nordic Insights:
“So far this season I feel like I have spent quite a bit of time just trying to be the best version of myself, and so far it’s been pretty good.
“I’ve really enjoyed being with the team and am enjoying the time on the road, which is sometimes hard. I definitely have been working hard to find my place in like kind of a new team, and without maybe my closest peers with me all the time.
“And so far, so good. It’s been really fun, and I’ve enjoyed it. And so I think that definitely helps with making this a sustainable season and to keep good results coming. So I’ll continue to focus on that aspect and skiing like myself, being myself, acting like myself, and hope that that brings the best out of me, and gives the team the best version of myself as well.”
“Not my best day,” Kern candidly wrote on Instagram of her race. But she was still thrilled with the overall energy of the American team after an extremely strong weekend in Östersund.
“The momentum is amazing,” Kern said in comments to multiple outlets. “The energy is amazing. The men’s sprint yesterday was so inspiring, and everyone had so much stoke and energy off of that. And I think the belief on this team is all around that we can compete at the top with the best on any given day in any format. And I think really, the power of belief in this team is so important and has really built the momentum forward. So it’s really cool to witness these historic moments and do it together as a team.”
I don’t think I got formal comments from Laukli today; sorry. You could do worse than “go america hot damn 🦅” for the current mood of this team. Time for yet another limning the zeitgeist tag.
ETA: Caught up with Laukli the next day; busy day for the whole team. Here’s Laukli, in writing to Nordic Insights, on why the interval-start skate format speaks to her so much:
“I think there is no question that interval start skate races are my favorite discipline, and always the longer the better. The biggest thing about these races, beyond the technique, is just being able to control my own race and execute the pacing, tactics, and technique exactly how I would like. It is probably mostly from a lack of experience, but with mass start races I always find myself overly frustrated with the lack of control and being able to ski my own race. In time I would like to navigate and learn how to approach mass starts better because I do think they can be a lot of fun, but for now I will forever choose an individual start skate race.”
Period 1 of the 2023/2024 World Cup season wraps up next weekend with a skate sprint, a 20km skiathlon, and a 10km interval-start classic in Trondheim, Norway, in a preview of the 2025 World Championships venue. It will be the first skate sprint of the season, but hardly the last, and the first and last skiathlon.
— Gavin Kentch
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