By Gavin Kentch
On the day of the quintessential Midwestern ski race, two athletes with strong Midwestern ties led the way. Jessie Diggins and Gus Schumacher broke away from their pursuers late in Saturday’s 50th running of the American Birkebeiner to win the 2024 edition of the race. It was the first Birkie win for both athletes, though Diggins famously won the Kortelopet in 2008 and 2009 while still in high school.
Diggins’s Midwestern bona fides are well established. She was born and raised in Afton, Minnesota, about a half-hour drive outside of the Twin Cities. She went to Stillwater Area High School, home of the Ponies. She won the Minnesota state championship in 2007, 2008, and 2010. She won the Korte in 2008 and 2009, as noted. In 2011, she returned from racing three races at World Championships to come back home and contest Junior Nationals, because they were just down the road at Wirth Park. (Spoiler alert: She won every race.) She sometimes travels through Europe with a shirt portraying a bottle of ketchup on it, caption, “Minnesota spicy.”
So Jessie Diggins has always been very Midwestern, but now she can finally add a victory in the Birkie to that list. Contesting a race that this year was held over five laps around a 10-kilometer loop of heroically manmade snow staged out of the Birkie trailhead in Cable, Diggins and Flora Dolci of France made it a two-woman race by the opening kilometers. They had dropped the rest of the women’s field by partway through lap one.
The two women essentially skied together for the next 40+ kilometers. It was close for a long time, and then it wasn’t, with Diggins opening up a lead on Dolci over the second half of lap five and keeping it to the finish. Diggins won by 26 seconds over Dolci. Alayna Sonnesyn (Midwest ties: grew up in Plymouth, skied for Wayzata) led in a large chase pack roughly four minutes later for third. Hannah Rudd and Caitlin Patterson were fourth and fifth.
Diggins graciously answered post-race questions for Nordic Insights via audio on a busy day for her. I’ve transcribed her quote below for ease of reading, but you should also take a second to listen to some or all of the original audio, embedded just above here. I can’t tell you how you should feel about this, but this reads to me as someone coming off one of the highest-pressure weeks of her entire career, and deeply happy, and fulfilled, to have had the chance to race in the Midwest, two weekends in a row, at the height of her powers. You love to see it.
(As is likely apparent from the quote, I asked Diggins about the episode in one of her teenaged Kortelopets in which she had a serious mid-race flirtation with just continuing past the Korte/Birkie cutoff and proceeding to the finish of the full-length race on Main Street, notwithstanding that (a) she didn’t have any parents or other support in Hayward and (b) she was wearing a Korte bib at the time. In Diggins’s telling, she got far enough down the Birkie course for a man with a megaphone to publicly call her out and direct her back to the Korte course. Against all odds, this young woman grew up to say, on the record a decade-plus later, that it was “total crap” that women had never got to race the full 50km distance at Holmenkollen.)
[Read more from November 2022: Jessie Diggins on the Season Ahead: Nothing to Prove, and ‘So Psyched’ to Race Holmenkollen 50km]
Anyway, here’s Diggins earlier today:
“So the question was, If I had to tell my 15-year-old self, or 17-year-old self, who tried to sneak into the Birkie, that years later I would get a chance to win it, what would I say?
“And firstly, I would say, ‘Don’t sneak into the Birkie; do it the right way.’
“But secondly, it was SO fun. I’ve waited a very long time to get to finally ski the full American Birkebeiner and be part of this family tradition and this community of people, and it did not disappoint. It was amazing.
“I am so impressed with the Birkie crew for getting a really nice 10-kilometer loop of manmade snow and making this happen, despite all the challenges of such a tough winter. And because it was so many laps, we had amazing cheering pretty much all the way around. It was so cool to share this with the community. We had so much fun out there.
“And so I think the best part of my day was just — I mean, Flora [Dolci] and I were just smiling. It was so fun to ski with her; it was so much fun just seeing the crowds out there, seeing all the energy. Everyone’s so excited. It was a sunny day; it was beautiful.
“And to be able to come away with a Birkie win is something that’s very special for me. It means a lot because this is a huge part — I idolized this race growing up, and so this is a huge part of our family life. So it was really, really cool to get to do that and be part of it.”
In later comments shared on the ABSF Facebook page, Diggins said, “I feel like until I did the Birkie, I was really missing something big. And now I can finally say I’m a true Midwesterner.” This… may not have been sarcasm.
Gus Schumacher has spent his entire career skiing for two Anchorage-based teams, first Alaska Winter Stars and now (effective this season) APU Nordic Ski Center, but he was born in Madison when his father was finishing a medical residency there, and spent roughly the first month of his life in the area. He still has family in the state — when he won the World Cup last weekend, he shouted out his grandmother for being able to watch him race in person, as she is unable to travel internationally at this point in her life — and has been known to rock a Badgers shirt when out training. I give him partial Midwestern status.
Schumacher had much more company in the men’s race than Diggins did in the women’s race. A dozen-plus men were still skiing together at 45km, well into the final half of lap five; this was golf course skiing, with rolling terrain and long sightlines, and no one was going to break away. Finally, Schumacher did, with approximately 3.5km to go; he created a small lead, which he kept to the finish. Last year’s champion, David Norris, led the chase pack over much of the closing kilometers, but lost out on second to Sam Hendry. Norris was third, a boot-length ahead of Scott Patterson in fourth. Gérard Agnellet, the 2022 champion here (okay, about 50km south of here in Hayward) was fifth.
“With the conditions fast/windy on a pretty easy course it played out as a pack race like I’d expect,” Schumacher wrote to Nordic Insights of his race later Saturday. “Some people were trying to push the pace on the longer working sections but it was tough to do much damage with the draft being big.”
I also asked Schumacher what he took away from his sojourn in the Midwest over the past week (in addition to over $34,000 in prize money between the win in Cable today and the win in Minneapolis last Sunday). Here’s Schumacher:
“I’m taking away that the American (and Midwest) ski community is the absolute best. I’ve been feeling so much love and stoke for the sport here. It’s been a great week.”
Here is the highlight video from SkinnySki and finish video embeds from xcswarriors:
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love project dedicated to publicizing American nordic skiing. 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.
