By Gavin Kentch
Jessie Diggins has stated that she is not thinking about Therese Johaug going into this season. But a whole lot of other people are (cite: FIS, NRK, NRK, NRK, NRK, Expressen, Devon Kershaw, inter alia). Before racing starts up in Ruka on Friday, yielding more data points to either confirm or belie pre-season speculation, here is some more pre-season speculation for you. Or at least some pre-season data; as you will see below, my ultimate conclusion is essentially, Gee, I don’t know, we’ll just have to wait for the races!
You’re welcome.
Seriously though, and because I suspect you will find this interesting: I requested help with data from the peerless Joran Elias, aka Statistical Skier, who promptly obliged with a spreadsheet containing all career FIS distance races in which both Jessie Diggins and Therese Johaug have raced.
After crunching the numbers, I concluded that there were 124 such races between the 2010/2011 season and the 2021/2022 season. 82 of them are “normal” World Cup races, 26 are Tour de Ski stages, 14 are Olympic or World Champs races, and two are the Beitostølen pre-season opener with a World Cup–level field. “Distance” here, meanwhile, means “anything longer than a sprint”; as you will see below, some prologues in the exquisitely awkward 3-kilometer range are included.
One athlete or the other did not finish four of those races, leaving 120 results in this corpus in which both Diggins and Johaug recorded a finish.
Across those 120 races, Johaug’s head-to-head record against Diggins currently stands at 114–6 going into the 2024/2025 World Cup season.
Here are the six distance races in both women’s careers in which Jessie Diggins has finished ahead of Therese Johaug:
- January 29, 2021: World Cup 10km interval-start skate, Falun (Diggins first, Johaug second)
- March 11, 2016: World Cup 10km interval-start skate, Canmore (Diggins fifth, Johaug sixth)
- January 8, 2016: Tour de Ski 5km interval-start skate, Toblach (Diggins first, Johaug fifth)
- February 24, 2015: World Championships 10km interval-start skate, Falun (Diggins second, Johaug 27th)
- March 22, 2013: World Cup Finals 2.5km interval-start skate, Falun (Diggins 8th, Johaug 11th)
- December 28, 2013: Tour de Ski 3km interval-start skate, Oberhof (Diggins 5th, Johaug 11th)
While it is by now generally accepted that Johaug is the greatest female distance skier of all time, so long as I have the data in front of me here are two more observations that seek to quantify Johaug’s track record across the latter half of her career.
One, if you exclude the 2015 World Championships 10km — on the one hand, scoreboard; on the other hand, it is fair to say that the results of many seeded-group athletes that day were not consistent with their mean results — then Johaug’s worst finish in distance races of 5km and greater, over this entire ten-plus-year period, was sixth. This occurred on four separate occasions, most recently in 2016.
(I am aware that there was an 18-month doping suspension in there, such that Johaug was not racing throughout that entire time. Fwiw, Diggins thinks that Johaug made “an honest mistake” and should have been allowed to race.)
Two, since the 2016/2017 season, Johaug finished off the podium in a distance race precisely once: She was fourth in a mass-start 10km classic in the Tour de Ski in January 2020. She was on the podium in all other distance races she contested in that time. This includes both Olympic and World Championship races as well as the World Cup circuit.
So what does all this mean for this season?
I have no idea!
No, really, I truly don’t. On the one hand, it is undeniable that Therese Johaug was a better distance skier than Jessie Diggins, as well as everyone else on the planet, over the second half of the first part of her career (implication: maybe she still is). On the other hand, it has been two years since Johaug last raced the World Cup, and in that window Diggins has established herself as arguably the best in the field in women’s distance skate races (implication: if Diggins is faster now then a substantial gap has closed).
On the third hand, Johaug showed up for Norwegian national championships in March at the end of the 2023/2024 season, whereupon she won the 30km interval-start skate by nearly three minutes over Sophia Laukli (yes I know that much of the rest of the field was coming off World Cup racing, and also that Norwegian women’s skiing is… not that great right now).
On the fourth hand, Johaug and husband Nils Jakob Hoff have a toddler, Kristin, at home. When they traveled to Beitostølen last weekend the whole family went, but Johaug got her own room while Hoff and the baby were together in the other. (Any parent can tell you why. Indeed, the family plans to maintain this sleeping arrangement at home through March 9, 2025, the final day of world champs, NRK has reported.) Kristin has until recently been in daycare, meaning that germs happen, and Johaug has publicly shared that she experienced a setback in training this fall while rushing to fit in a second workout before afternoon pickup and shorting herself on recovery. #relatable
On the fifth hand, Devon Kershaw thinks that the only question is how many gold medals Johaug will win in Trondheim, and the preliminary line shows pre-season betting odds on Johaug winning the World Champs 50km of 4/11, against 7/1 for Diggins. (I.e., the odds reflect a 73-percent probability that Johaug wins, and a 12.5-percent probability that Diggins wins. I, personally, find sports gambling more sketchy than sinful, but the reporter in me is not above using sportsbooks as a proxy for public sentiment.)
In “conclusion,” and this truly is the most definitive thing I can say here, I would absolutely not be surprised to see either of Diggins or Johaug come out ahead in Sunday’s mass start 20km skate. (Or Frida Karlsson, or Ebba Andersson, or Rosie Brennan; I hear there are more than two athletes in the women’s field these days.) I would be surprised to see Diggins faster on Friday, a 10km interval-start classic race; as Diggins herself noted earlier this week, “There are definitely things that I have not won. And most of them start with ‘classic.’” Oh and also Johaug won this race in Beitostølen last weekend. By 40 seconds.
[Read more: Jessie Diggins on the 2024/2025 Season: Still looking for ‘the bottom of the well’]
But in skate races, I truly do not know what to expect, nor on what slopes to plot out the trend lines of Diggins’s steady growth versus Johaug’s return at age 36. We will know more, sort of, after this weekend, though even then, as Diggins observed in Monday’s press conference, “It’s okay to work your way into the season,” adding that “one data point is not a trend.” But if you’d like a lot of historical data points to tide you over till we start getting some contemporary ones, here they are.
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, last season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
