By Gavin Kentch
The Americans went out with a bang today. Racing earlier Sunday in picture-perfect conditions in Falun, the team ranked a narrow fourth in this season’s Nations Cup standings, but third in total podiums, had strong finishes across the board to close out the 2023/2024 World Cup season.
Jessie Diggins won the race, a 20-kilometer mass start skate race on a course that epically suits her, claiming the overall crystal globe with aplomb. Rosie Brennan was 10th, her fifteenth individual top-10 of this season. Novie McCabe was 11th, a career-best World Cup finish by a huge margin (*non–Alpe Cermis category). Sophia Laukli was 17th.
Sydney Palmer-Leger flew over for a single European World Cup start this season and made the most of it, finishing 23rd (also a career best). Haley Brewster, in the third European World Cup start of both her career and her weekend, was 32nd (not a career best, but a career best for racing in Europe/not in front of the boisterous home crowds of Minneapolis). Lots to celebrate out there today.
Not to be outdone were the American men. Gus Schumacher finished 12th in a tight race, 6.9 seconds off the podium. Scott Patterson closed out a storied career in 15th, his best European World Cup result this season by far. Zanden McMullen was 27th. Behind them, Kevin Bolger was 44th, Zak Ketterson 45th, Peter Wolter 60th, and Michael Earnhart 79th.
Coming into today, Johannes Høsflot Klæbo had won the last six races in a row, moving him into a tie with Johannes Høsflot Klæbo (first part of the 2022/2023 season) and Johannes Høsflot Klæbo (second part of the 2022/2023 season) for the most consecutive victories by a male World Cup skier all time. Surprising no one, at this point in this season, Klæbo broke up the unseemly logjam at the top of those rankings when he moved to the front at just the right moment at the end of today’s race, led out the sprint with what Kris Freeman once memorably called his “annoyingly perfect” technique, and won with sufficient ease that he could slow down and look around as he crossed the line.
Klæbo now stands alone at the top of this leaderboard with seven consecutive wins. Were it not for one Gus Schumacher in Minneapolis last month, he would already be at ten in a row.
“Since Oberhof it’s been really amazing so it’s good to finish off this way,” Klaebo told FIS of a season in which he won 12 of his last 15 races.
Gjøran Tefre, of Norway, a late-season call-up making his first World Cup start this year following strong results in recent Scando Cup contests, took second. It was not only his first individual World Cup podium, it was also 21 spots better than his previous career-best World Cup distance result, a 23rd in Nové Město a full four years ago. Tefre is currently 29 years old. May I observe, for not the first time, that success in World Cup distance skiing takes time.
Third place today went to Martin Løwstrøm Nyenget, of Norway, age 31. You may sense a theme here.
Behind the Norwegians, but not all that far — 16th place today was just 11.3 seconds back of first — came Scott Patterson, of Alaska, age 32. Today marked Patterson’s final World Cup race, ending a career at the highest level of the sport that began with a 42nd place in a distance race in Nové Město in January 2016. In between, he raced consistently well on the World Cup and eye-poppingly well at global championships, logging an 8th, 11th, and 11th in the longest Olympic races, and 10th, 14th, and 15th at World Champs.
By the time I woke up in Anchorage today the World Cup crew had already moved into season-ending party mode on Falun time (as they should!), and USSS media had provided me a lot of quotes from Diggins, and nothing more. But I took a chance and emailed Patterson anyway; I owe him a full career retrospective piece at some point, but I also felt like I should mark today’s final race.
Patterson, of course, wrote back an hour later.
“We had a celebration last night at the team meeting that definitely brought up some emotions,” he wrote when asked about the significance of this being his final race. “I was also thinking about it a bit while warming up, but during the race my normal race mode took over.”
As for the race itself: “I’m pleased with how I skied today,” Patterson continued. “I didn’t have the best start and ended up much further back than I wanted early. It was a bit hectic with a narrow course and large field, but over the first couple laps I was able to make up for the start and move into a better position. It was also nice that the front group was mostly pushing the pace so it strung the pack out. In the end I know I don’t have much of a sprint and that was the case again. For a few moments I believed I could beat at least a couple of the guys around me, but that wasn’t the case. I would have like a few more times up the Morderbakken to string it out a little more. Overall it was a good note to end the season on.”
As noted above, Patterson (South Anchorage High School) was joined in the top-30 by fellow Alaska Skimeisters Gus Schumacher (Robert Service High School) in 12th and Zanden McMullen (South) in 27th. The fourth Alaska Skimeister in the field, Michael Earnhart (Chugiak High School), was 79th.
Okay, now it’s time to talk about Jessie Diggins.
Diggins came into today guarding a 75-point lead over Linn Svahn in the standings for the overall crystal globe. Diggins is probably the best skate skier in the current women’s World Cup field, and has described this venue as her favorite on the circuit, saying, “It feels like the courses are built for me” and noting the working downhills that are canonically her strength. So the pieces were all in place for her to have a strong race; she just had to execute once the gun went off.
Reader, Diggins delivered. She took the first intermediate bonus sprint at 5.8km, at a time when Svahn was still in contact and could potentially contend, and then, 10km later, the second, at a time when Svahn was no longer in touch and Diggins’s victory in the overall was already mathematically assured.
But that’s not all. For not the first time in her career, Diggins used a powerful free skate to carry more speed into a closing downhill than anyone around her, jumpskated up a final short uphill with the fastest tempo in the field, moved into the home stretch with steely determination and a desperately ragged yet also brutally successful technique, and closed down the race with braids flying to take the win. She exulted across the line before immediately collapsing as if she had been shot, as is her wont. The performance was no less impressive for being familiar; to win the race when everyone around you knows what you want to do in the final kilometers is an art.
Diggins’s final pursuers, in this case, were Heidi Weng, who was 0.9 seconds back at the line, and Anne Kjersti Kalvå, who was 2.2 seconds back. Jonna Sundling (+9.9) and Kerttu Niskanen (+10.4) led in the pursuers. Svahn faded considerably over the second half of the race, crossing the line in 26th.
“Right now it stings quite a lot and it feels like every time I get the question, it stings even more,” said Svahn at the finish, according to an auto-translation. “But we’ll see, with a little distance maybe it will still feel perfectly fine.”
It is difficult to ever feel sympathy for Norway as underdogs, but Sunday was, somehow, the first time this season that there were two Norwegian women on a single World Cup podium, as the all-time dominant ski nation continues to feel its way into a post-Johaug era.
I will editorialize that you should feel some sympathy for Heidi Weng, now 32 (she was born a month before Diggins), who has spent the last four years living like a Covid-avoiding monk probably more than anyone else in the World Cup field — she was wearing an N95 in the outdoor mixed zone in Canmore last month — but still missed the 2022 Olympics following an untimely case of the novel coronavirus and skied at a fraction of her historical level in the 2022/2023 season. Kalvå has also largely gone backwards this year after a breakout performance in 2022/2023, and so was presumptively pleased to end the season with a return to form.
Now on to Diggins for the rest of this article.
Winning “wasn’t the most important thing today,” Diggins said in audio comments provided by USSS. “I really just wanted to go there and ski with guts and have fun. And I did, and it was so cool. The course was filled with our coaches and our wax techs, and they’ve been really, really important and special people to me for a very long time, So I just wanted to go ski hard.”
“It’s been a hard year,” Diggins added, in reference to her well-publicized concerns over mental health and a recurrence of issues with disordered eating. “There’s been a lot of ups and downs.”
[Read more: Jessie Diggins on the 2023/2024 Season: Taking Care of Her Mental Health, and Taking Things Day by Day]
“And that’s why it was so important to lean on my support team,” she continued. “I could not have done this alone. And I got a lot of hope from a lot of people. A lot of support, a lot of hugs. And that really meant a lot to me; it really helped me when I was having a tough time.”
“And I think that’s why it was so special to have made it through the season, and to be healthy and strong enough to race all the races this season. That was, I think, that was the big victory. And the globe is a nice bonus, but the real victory is being on those start lines. The season has been long; now it’s over, and the sun is shining.”
So what’s next for the now two-time overall crystal globe champion?
“I’m going to go home,” Diggins observed. “And I’m going to be in my house and sleep in my own bed and finally get to be with my husband. He has waited for me this season and supported me just unconditionally and that means the world to me.”
In conclusion, and since I still don’t have a photo subscription at this place, here are a lot of Instagram posts of people saying nice things about Diggins today:
U.S. Ski Team: “She just keeps rewriting history.”
FIS: “Queen of the cross-country skiing world for the second time in her career.”
Also FIS: “A superwoman.”
Salomon: “How to apply glitter (everywhere) — a tutorial.”
Diggins has now placed first, second, second, and first in the overall standings over the past four seasons.
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love 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.
