By Gavin Kentch
Jessie Diggins is — bear with me here for my deeply controversial thesis statement — the most-covered, most popular, and most visible American cross-country skier of all time. She is also less than 24 hours away from racing a World Cup 30 miles from her childhood home, a World Cup weekend that she was instrumental in helping to bring to Theodore Wirth Park in central Minneapolis. She leads all Loppet Cup coverage (including, it must be said, mine, though this article takes a different tone than most), and the local paper just ran an article entitled, “How Jessie Diggins brought World Cup cross-country skiing to Minneapolis.”
So can there possibly be anything left to say at this point about what this weekend means to Diggins, and on how much attention she has received from media and from fans? Yes, actually. Read on for more.
It was Tuesday afternoon in Canmore. Diggins had raced valiantly in the classic sprint but had gone out in the quarterfinals for the first time (!) all season, done in by a mismatch between her current physical capabilities and the course presented to her that day. “I need to have a stronger doublepole and I know that I feel a little bit weak in the upper body right now,” Diggins matter-of-factly said of her race that ended with a long doublepole section.
The sun was out. She had gotten in her cooldown. Tomorrow was a travel day; for the first time all weekend she had four days before her next race, not one or two. I can’t tell you what Diggins was thinking that moment, but to me it felt, in many ways, like the calm before the storm.
There is a hierarchy to the mixed zone at a World Cup race, reflecting, well, where the money comes from. Athletes’ first stop is before the video cameras of Infront, the official FIS broadcast partner, aka the reason why I was scared to share even a shaky three-second video of live race action as a story on the Nordic Insights Instagram account. Next up is any other media on site doing live video interviews, in this case Viaplay and Swedish outlet Expressen. Last up are the great unwashed hordes of print media, which, as I said in the caption above, at this venue consisted of a grand total of two reporters from Nordic Insights and one from FasterSkier, plus two people affiliated with Nordiq Canada.
The flow of traffic is such that athletes approach the mixed zone, pick up a pair of sponsor skis and poles from a cache placed there for just this purpose (see photo above), carry the skis with them into the mixed zone, and assume the ubiquitous brands-visible pose during all interviews with broadcast media. They then move down the rest of the line, speak with as many reporters as they wish to, and return the skis to the sponsor stockpile before going about their day. Athletes tend to instinctively adopt the brands-out pose no matter who they are speaking with; more than once I encouraged an athlete to put their skis down for a second so they could, like, eat or drink or zip up their jacket, since I was recording audio and not video.
“I don’t know why I’m holding these,” Diggins said as she approached the three of us holding down the fort in Canmore for English-language print media, display skis and poles in hand.
“Because you were on live TV,” USSS press officer Leann Bentley pointed out.
“We were on live TV, but now I don’t need to hold them,” Diggins reasoned.
At this point, this reporter spoke up. “Given what I look like after a week of not shaving,” I said, “I am glad we’re not on live TV. I look like crap,” I added, self-effacingly but not inaccurately.
“You know how hard it is to have cameras following you the second after you cross the finish line?” Diggins inquired.
Is that annoying, asked a reporter, that you’ve collapsed and the camera’s right there, or at this point are you not caring? (In the remainder of this article, questions are paraphrased; Diggins’s answers remain verbatim. I took off quotation marks after this section to make it read more like a transcript.)
“I wouldn’t say it’s annoying because I’m unaware of its presence until afterwards,” Diggins said. “But mostly it’s just, your most vulnerable self is being followed all the time.
“And also it’s interesting because we’re a sport where we’re obviously outdoors, and so you have no privacy for everything that you’re doing. And on the one hand I think that’s really cool because all the spectators and kids get to see, like, Hey they’re just putting on one boot at a time just like I do, you know? And there’s nothing special; they’re just jogging around. And I think it humanizes the sport. But at the same time if you’re like, Wow I need a second — you don’t have a second.”
Do you wish they wouldn’t do that at the finish line?
I mean, I don’t know if what I want is really important or going to change it. So I think it’s more like, I just have to acknowledge, like, that’s part of it. But I’m not going to start like curling my hair and putting on mascara just because they’re following me; I’m not going to change what I do.
I was talking about this with another athlete, about this dynamic of your being visible all the time when you’re at the venue. He used the phrase “being in the zoo” to describe being on this side of the fence in the athlete area. I know you’re really dedicated to outreach; I know you like the fans; there are worse problems than being popular. But is it tough that from the second you get here to when you go home, people can see you?
It is awkward when you’re like doing the swim team sports bra change. There are definitely times when it’s appropriate for people to be filming you, and times when it’s inappropriate, perhaps. And you just sort of hope people use their best judgment when those times are.
But at the same time, yeah, I think that that has been something I’ve had to adjust and get used to over the years. Because when you grow up as a cross-country ski racer from the U.S., you don’t expect to be in tabloids. Or you don’t expect that, you know, part of my career path will involve people, like, wanting my time and attention. Like that’s just not really — when I was 17, looking at this as a job, I was like, Maybe I’ll be interviewed once at U.S. Nationals. But like that’s it.
And so it’s definitely been this massive shift for me, and it keeps shifting over the years, and it’s been something where I have to figure out how to not be overwhelmed by it.
Because I only have a finite amount of energy, right? And you want to give everything to everyone, but you can’t. And so that’s something I’m trying to balance. And I hope I’m doing an okay job, and I hope people understand that I am doing my best. If I don’t interact with everyone it’s not because I don’t want to, it’s because I can’t. And because we are racing so much. It takes so much of your energy that sometimes you’re like, I actually just really need to go lay in bed and nap.
At this point are you basically scheduled almost in five-minute increments for your time back home?
Yeah…
What kind of stuff does that entail over the next three to four days?
Well a lot of the day is taken up by your normal, like, race things, right? I’ll go home [from training], and then you fill out a race report, you fill out your training log, and then you go for a jog, and you get a massage, and you know, the whole thing. And that actually eats up quite a bit of your day.
And then we have a lot of people who support the team behind the scenes, which is really, really cool, and we want to make sure we thank them. And so there are some events, dinners, gatherings. And I think that’s going to be really cool, but it’s going to be a balance for sure.
Is maybe the biggest challenge of the week not putting too much energy into stuff that isn’t ski racing?
Yeah. My goal is to enjoy it, and hopefully not be so overwhelmed that I can’t be present. And so that’s my goal, and it can be a delicate balance for sure, but one that I am going to try to achieve.
I mean this will be an amazing weekend. But is it fair to say that that dynamic would be different for you if these races were in, like, Anchorage or Soldier Hollow?
Probably. Because also I probably would not have been quite as involved in getting it there, simply because I don’t live there, right? And so yeah, I think it is interesting. It feels — it’s my hometown World Cup, you know, and so I do think it puts a little more on me. But that’s also something that I’ve worked for.
Would you say that the kind of pressure and attention you’re getting right now is on par with the Olympics? [For perspective, the Pyeongchang Olympics left Diggins so stressed that the skin started falling off her hands, to the point where she literally lost some of her fingerprints. And this was before the next two Olympic medals, and next two world champs medals, and the World Cup overall, and the two Tour de Ski wins, and the global pandemic, and her husband’s inability to visit her in Europe all season, and so on.]
That’s a good question. Well the last one was funny because it was Covid, right, so like the in-person [aspect] was obviously not really existent, which changed things, right. But yeah — I think it is actually on par with Olympic-level pressure. And also given that I’m in the yellow bib, and that comes with its own different, special kind of pressure that feels about as big as the Olympics to me.
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This is the type of story that you realistically only get if you are the venue yourself, as I was in Canmore for a week. Travel for in-person reporting is not cheap, and travel to anywhere from Alaska is particularly not cheap.
Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in year one of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year two of Nordic Insights for you to be reading now: I was okay with working for very little money to get this love letter to American cross-country skiing off the ground, but I didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing so. If you would like to support what remains a brutally shoestring operation, this season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
