By Adele Haeg
Buongiorno! And benvenuto to Toblach, Italy, and the 19th edition of the Tour de Ski. Earlier Saturday, defending champion Jessie Diggins took first in the first stage of the Tour, the skate sprint, after winning both her quarterfinal and semifinal heats.
Kikkan Randall noted on the live commentary that Toblach is Diggins’s home snow (of Europe). Toblach and Jessie Diggins go together like brown cheese and golden bibs. Diggins told the New York Times this week, “I love Italy. I love the pasta and the people and the jagged raw mountains, but it’s also where I got my first-ever World Cup podium and victory, and it’s been a place of really special memories for me.”
Flashback to January 8, 2016. It was the 5-kilometer individual start skate race in Toblach, the third stage of the 10th edition of the Tour de Ski. Jessie Diggins was 26 years old. She had never won a World Cup before. Diggins shocked her Norwegian competition in Toblach that day and won the stage, by less than a second over second-place Heidi Weng.
The U.S. Ski Team head coach at the time, Chris Grover, commented after the race to the ski magazine First Tracks, “There are very few skiers in the world that can close down the final kilometer of a course like Jessie. She was fierce and unrelenting on the downhills and flats leading back to the stadium; pushing extremely hard on her skis.”
Flash forward to 2024. Now Diggins has two Tour de Ski overall wins to her name, and an ABR trail named after her, among other accolades. Nine years after her first win in Toblach, there are still very very few skiers on the circuit who have a sprint finish as gritty as Diggins’s. She proved that in Ruka for her first win of this season and she proved it again today, rocketing past Jasmi Joensuu of Finland in the final few meters of the skate sprint to claim her 23rd World Cup win ever. Diggins doesn’t do the Klæbo swagger — at the finish she’s got her poles on, and she’s firing on every cylinder until she’s across the line. It’s thrilling, even when she doesn’t collapse dramatically.
Diggins commented to reporters on-site after her win, “I kind of thought I was getting old and not ready to have another sprint victory in my life, so this was an amazing surprise.”
Today’s victory would have been a surprise. Usually, Diggins has more competition for sprints. She hasn’t won one outright in three years. But distance specialists Therese Johaug and Heidi Weng did not qualify for the heats, and the Swedish armada was largely MIA due to illness and injury. The Swedes who did race today also had a few minor catastrophes: Johanna Hagström, who qualified second, fell in her semifinal heat, then her teammate Maja Dahlqvist broke her pole in the final. Linn Svahn qualified fourth but didn’t make it into the semifinals.
No Swedes or Norwegians on the podium today. So then, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Diggins (2:59.62) and Joensuu (+0.31) first and second. Joensuu led for much of the final; Diggins chose the outside lane to start and skied the line that kept her out of danger at the tricky turn where Ben Ogden would fall in the men’s final. While Diggins was still in second going over the top of the major hill, when she made her move coming off the bottom, Joensuu couldn’t counter it.
Nadine Fähndrich of Switzerland snagged the last podium spot, less than a half-second off Diggins. Anja Weber also made the final, finishing fifth. The Swiss and Finnish women had the spotlight today, not the Swedish or Norwegian women. That’s the Tour for you. Expect the unexpected.
Diggins was the only American woman in the semifinals today. Julia Kern finished 14th, Alayna Sonnesyn 19th, Rosie Brennan 29th, and Sophia Laukli, who won the Alpe Cermis stage last season, did not make it out of qualification. Laukli is, to put it mildly, not a sprinter.
Woohoo for Alayna Sonnesyn, who like me was once a Minnesota high school ski racer. Today’s result was Sonnesyn’s first World Cup top-20 finish and her career best, which she earned against competition only slightly stiffer than at state in Biwabik, Minnesota.
Here’s Alayna on today’s race: “It’s definitely a bit of a kick in the pants to get going again after a holiday break! But it was also good to get so much rest in and I knew that rest was going to carry me into the tour with fresh energy. Yesterday I focused on a really big race prep workout to get things going again and that seemed to work well for me.”
Rosie Brennan commented on the Toblach sprint course in an audio recording to Nordic Insights: “Toblach is an amazing place, wonderful skiing, but the sprint course is very frustrating. You’re pretty much always turning. And so there’s just a lot of pinch points and not a lot of room to pass. And so it’s very advantageous to be able to at least get out fast, which is maybe my weakest part of sprinting. So yeah, I find this course very frustrating.”
Frustrating, yes, but Brennan added: “I felt okay, so I have some hope for moving forward from today.” Diggins was able to avoid those “pinch points” Brennan mentioned and that proved to be what separated her from the Swedish women.
Diggins currently leads the 19th Tour de Ski with an official time in the standings of 1:55, reflecting her clock time of 2:55 in the sprint qual plus a 60-second time bonus for finishing first in the final. Going into tomorrow’s 15-kilometer classic mass start race, Diggins leads Joensuu and Fähndrich by 7 and 15 seconds, respectively. Diggins already has a substantial gap over Weng (37th, 1:08 back) and Johaug (40th, 1:09 back) in the overall standings.
All five American women who raced today are on the start list for tomorrow’s classic race.
Diggins also leads the Tour sprint standings. While the greatest number of sprint points are awarded in the two sprints, today and in stage five, points will also be awarded for intermediate sprints in all five distance races, not only mass start races but also interval-start races.
Results: skate sprint | Tour de Ski overall
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