By Noah Eckstein
For American nordic skiers, it was a good day to have a good day. In the morning, Gus Schumacher dusted all but one of a flock of Norwegians to claim his second career World Cup podium. Over on the more shooty side of the spectrum, Campbell Wright claimed his second straight (!) silver medal at biathlon World Championships.
But topping the heap was, of course, the singular Jessie Diggins. In Sunday’s Falun 20-kilometer mass start skate, Diggins skied away from a small group of favorites in the final kilometer to claim her sixth win of the season and 25th World Cup victory of her career. She was joined on the podium by Heidi Weng of Norway and Ebba Andersson of Sweden.
And, not to be forgotten, fellow American Julia Kern capitalized on her ripping form of late to claim a huge distance personal best by leading the chase pack across the line in sixth.
Before diving into today’s race in Falun, it’s worth spending a moment on the enormity of Wright’s exploits on biathlon’s biggest stage over the past few days. The 22-year-old New Zealand–born athlete (is AmeriKiwi a thing?) first shocked the European biathlon stalwarts with his second place in Saturday’s sprint. He trailed only Johannes Thingnes Bø, whose 132 career IBU World Cup wins give him a pedigree roughly on par with that of Johannes Høsflot Klæbo. While Wright had a number of World Cup top-10s coming into this year’s championships, a World Champs podium is nonetheless an enormous step up and a defining moment of his young career.
Then, he went out and did the same thing the next day in the 12.5-kilometer pursuit. Bonkers!
Wright’s two podium performances make him the owner of fully 29 percent of biathlon World Championships medals earned by Americans, joining legends Susan Dunklee, Lowell Bailey, Tim Burke, and Josh Thompson in the medal table. Happily enough, Wright has not also joined some names on that list at the “allegedly turning a blind eye to endemic sexual abuse” table.
If you’re not watching biathlon already, you should be. Plus, live streams are blessedly free world-wide on the IBU website (*cough* FIS *cough*). If nothing else, tune in to get a glimpse of Wright’s glorious antipodean mullet (see slide two above).
Ok, back to rifle-less skiing.
Diggins, ever the team player, started both her post-race FIS interview and her later comments to the media by gassing up her teammates about their big results, as well as the whole U.S. wax team for the blazing skis.
“[Schumacher’s podium] was so awesome,” Diggins said on the broadcast after her win. “Julia and I were jumping up and down on the bed screaming at the TV, so it definitely got me really excited, and also really sweaty — I was like, I’m warmed up, let’s go. So that was really, really cool. Huge congrats to the wax techs; they’ve been working so hard all weekend and I’ve had amazing skis all weekend and that’s a huge part of this. So this was a win for the whole truck and the whole team, and it’s awesome momentum going into Trondheim.”
The teammate love-fest continued on to Kern’s big distance personal best. “And then Julia had an awesome race, oh my gosh, that was really cool,” Diggins said in audio comments to multiple outlets. “Just a lot of cool things going around, and I think that was one of the highlights of my day.”
The high-energy vibes were apparent on the American team as Diggins, Kern, and Sophia Laukli all made themselves known at the front of the pack in the race’s early stages. Diggins traded pulls with Andersson, Weng, and Norwegian Nora Sanness, whom you may remember from the lead pack of the 20km skate in Engadin.
By the end of the second of five four-kilometer laps, the lead pack had shrunk to roughly 17 skiers, all three American skiers safely tucked within.
On the third lap, an elite pack of five — Diggins, Andersson, Weng, Sanness, and Victoria Carl of Germany — began to pull away.
Things began to hurt for Diggins around this point. “To be totally honest,” she said to the press, “I was starting to cramp up, and I think if the fourth lap had been a little faster I would have been off the back. But I was just thinking, Hang on, you don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s not over until the finish line. Yeah, I was just trying to hang on there and see what could happen in the final sprint.”
Both Kern and Laukli, sitting in an eight-strong chase pack, burned some matches to try bring the leaders back, but the gap was only going in one direction.
On the fourth lap, Laukli — who had up until that point looked quite strong — suddenly dropped like a rock off the back of the chase pack. She eventually lost nearly a minute and a half to teammate Kern over the last five kilometers.
“I felt decent for the first half,” she wrote to Nordic Insights, “and then I don’t really know what happened but my body shut down and couldn’t really keep going. So it was tough to get to the end. I’ve been training a lot for world champs, especially for the 50km, so I’m a bit tired from that and I’d say not in normal racing form.”
She will certainly be hoping this was nothing more than a bonk for ages, and that the next two weeks of tapering will bring that normal racing form roaring back.
In the closing kilometers of the race, Carl slid back from the lead pack after breaking a pole, and German teammate Pia Fink and Flora Dolci of France leapt off the front of the chase pack in an attempt to bridge up.
Up front, Diggins decided that her skis were fast enough to allow her to break away through the slipstream-y final sprint complex, taking a small gap over the final hill. Although Weng and Andersson very nearly closed her down in the draft, Diggins’s gap was just big enough to give her clear air as she tuck-skated up the finish straight. While the times were tight (both Weng and Andersson were less than a second back), Diggins clearly had this one in the bag.
Just behind, Kern had managed to keep Fink and Dolci in her sights, and she used her excellent skis to glide back up to them through the final descent before dropping the hammer up the finish straight to come in as the best of the rest.
Kern agreed with Diggins about the importance of Schumacher’s performance in getting the women’s team fired up. “Wow, today was really exciting,” she said in audio comments to media. “We were nervously watching the men’s race today and were so amped by Gus’s result and it looked like the skis were running really well so we were really excited when we headed out.”
Despite this, the race wasn’t smooth sailing.
“For me,” Kern said, “my plan was to be as far up in the front as possible. I knew on the big Mörderbakken that things would start to string out and gaps would form, so I really tried to be in a good position. I honestly didn’t feel as good today as I did yesterday, but I just told myself, You will recover, you just need to hang on every time. I was in the chase pack just hanging on for dear life and on the ropes, frankly, for a lot of the race.
“But I had amazing skis,” she emphasized, “so coming into the sprint course I was able to ski by the pack and found this extra gear and energy — my sprint legs maybe kicked in, and I kicked into sprint mode and had an incredible finish, catching the two girls, Pia and Flora, who had skied away from our pack, actually, on the Mörderbakken. It was a really exciting day — so cool to see Jessie win and Gus on the podium, and overall our techs just crushed the skis. For me, it was just, Believe, keep hanging on, and then waiting for the sprint out because that’s where I felt most confident and excited to make my move.”
While winning the sprint for sixth isn’t quite as sexy as winning a World Cup, it still marks a big step up for Kern, both in terms of her form this year and her distance skiing overall — this season had brought her only one top ten before the weekend, and this marks only the third distance World Cup top ten of her career.
It couldn’t come at a better time, with World Championships starting up in less than two weeks.
Two other Americans, Alayna Sonnesyn (Team Birkie) and Sydney Palmer-Leger, also ended up in the top 30 after skiing much of the race together. Sonnesyn, finishing 25th, was elated after a frustrating first half of the season.
“I’m really excited about my racing this weekend and feel so good to be back at sea level!” she wrote to Nordic Insights. “I hit a few bumpy road blocks in January — a cold, lots of time at high altitude, not enough recovery, and norovirus. This made it a tough mid-season for me but I believed if I could just give myself some training AND RECOVERY at sea level I could bounce back. Which is exactly what I did the past two weeks and I’m feeling like I have really good mental and physical energy right now. This makes me super excited going into World Champs in just over a week!”
Palmer-Leger, still only 23 years old, related that Falun’s status as a legendarily difficult course is well-deserved. “It was a tough and tactical race out there,” she wrote to Nordic Insights. “Five times up the big (murder) hill was mentally and physically challenging. I felt pretty strong out there and was thankfully able to ski with my teammate Alayna Sonnesyn. There were certain sections on the course where our skis were not running as fast.”
“I used every second I could to make places in the stadium and the first 2km where I was feeling the strongest. I was proud on the third lap that I caught the small group ahead of us. I hammered to the front of my group where I was able to catch and pass that group ahead of us. I am so thankful to have such strong teammates to be able to work with out there and amazing techs to produce speedy skis.”
The two other Americans racing, Sammy Smith and Kate Oldham (Montana State), finished a very respectable 38th and 39th.
What comes next? Diggins seemed to convey the sentiments of most athletes when she discussed her plans for the next two weeks. “Honestly, I’m excited to taper,” she said in her post-race interview. “I’ve been pushing a massive training load, so I’m ready to come down and get a little rest and then come into Trondheim and see my family.”
Ski fans, now might be a good time for a bit of a taper of your own because, between February 26th and March 9th, there is World Championships ski racing every. Single. Day. (Except one). See you then!
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 years one and two of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year three of Nordic Insights for you to be reading now: I was okay with working for very little money to get this love letter toAmerican 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.
