By Lukas Pigott
TRONDHEIM, Norway — The American team has landed in Trondheim and has been spending the last few days testing the tracks ahead of 2025 World Championships, which kick off tomorrow with skate sprints.
On Tuesday night, Jessie Diggins, Ben Ogden, and Gus Schumacher sat down with members of the media on a Zoom call to talk about the upcoming races.
When asked about their goals for the championships, Diggins’s reply was, “The big one is actually to realize that I am not my results and to separate my self-worth from the number next to my name on a piece of paper.”
Diggins, who is competing in her eighth World Championships — she has raced in every championships since Oslo in 2011 — has experience almost unparalleled in the World Cup field. She currently sits fourth on the all-time list of career individual World Cup starts, and second among active skiers, with 334. (Aino-Kaisa Saarinen is first overall here with 354 starts. Diggins could add this record to her palmarès by Period 3 of next season if she continues to stay healthy and start most races.)
Diggins also has a reasonably high amount of pressure ahead of these World Championships. As well as leading the overall World Cup and being the defending champion in the 10km interval-start event, she is among the biggest favorites to take home the gold medal in multiple events.
It’s been known for a while that Diggins has been struggling with a plantar fasciitis injury in her foot, so it was natural that this took center stage when Diggins was asked about her preparation for this year’s races.
“The injury to my plantar fascia happened right before the Tour de Ski and then during [the Tour de Ski] so I had a partial rupture basically right before it attaches to my heel bone,” Diggins said. “It’s healing really well but it has changed my run-up to the World Championships. I was able to do one distance classic race between the end of the Tour de Ski and now, which was a great test, but normally I would be spending those times in those training camps doing a lot more classic intensity and a lot more classic skiing in general.”
Despite this setback, Diggins remained upbeat.
“I feel like I’m always trying to work on my technique so I feel like I did have to adjust,” she said. “But in the long run I’m also very lucky because I feel like I was still able to train so the volume was still the same amount that I was hoping to target and the intensity was still the same amount, just in a different training mode. I feel like I was able to accomplish what I wanted to in the lead up, and I’m feeling excited.”
When asked how she is going to manage this championship coming off of her injury, Diggins said that she has made the decision to not race all races, and will sit out at least one event. What race that will be remains to be seen.
When Ogden and Schumacher were asked about their program for the championships, they agreed that they were in a privileged position where they could pick and choose from six races across eleven days, with the goal of getting a few really good performances, rather than many so-so ones. They both said that this is a scenario they could only have dreamed of a few years ago.
When asked about a dream scenario for them now, Ogden said, “A perfect moment for me at world champs would be to outsprint everybody for world champion gold in the skate sprint.”
Is that it, he was prompted by USSS press officer Leann Bentley.
“Then I say eloquent things in the media,” Ogden added.
For his part, Schumacher replied, “I’d say a relay day where [the pack] breaks off but the boys are able to hang with the pace at the front and I get to anchor us to a win, beating Klæbo in the final sprint in Trondheim.”
“And then you go shh,” Diggins chimed in, mimicking the Trondheim man’s trademark finish-line gesture.
“No,” Schumacher politely replied, “because apparently Devin and Alex Harvey already did that, so I’d probably just be excited.”
Slideshow below in embed. Never forget.
Embed from Getty ImagesEven if these scenarios don’t become reality this year, these athletes have experience bringing dreams to reality. They represent a strong and up-and-coming USA men’s team, mostly born in 2000 or a year or two later, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if these scenarios become reality in a few years.
When asked about this dynamic, Ogden said, “I think it’s a real blessing for us. We all grew up racing against each other, and I can remember back to the days when there was nothing in the world more motivating to me than beating Gus at Junior Nationals. And Luke [Jager], but you know, mostly Gus.”
Schumacher, smirking hugely: “Why is that?”
Ogden, also smirking: “I don’t know, just something about you. But yeah, like the change over the last couple years where it’s like now, you know, on any given day I could really care less if I beat Gus, it’s really about beating everybody else.”
Schumacher also talked about integrating the younger athletes that join the team, saying, “I’m really proud of us for feeling like all the new guys that come in that are not our birth years — that are up to like six years younger in Murphy Kimball — that I feel like we make a concerted effort to open up to them and include them in our activities. It’s not always that easy when you spend so much time together and have so much history together, but I think we do our best to really make it one team.”
Schumacher’s own preparation for the World Championships has been, in his own words, “quite good.”
He continued by saying, “I think the biggest difference for me compared to any other senior championship in my life is that I’m in better shape at a baseline than I’ve ever been before and my racing is just going much better in general. And that’s a really nice confidence to be able to carry into a championships, like kind of the feeling of, I don’t have to do anything special.”
Team USA is known for having a strong and positive team environment. This was on full display in the press conference, and while not the whole team was present, the three that were there were in very good spirits.
The American women’s team has in many ways been the forerunners for the American team’s environment and the way people view American cross-country skiing. As one Gus Schumacher said in a 2018 interview, “I think the goal obviously, sort of unspoken, but I would like to see us get to where the girls are. They have a ton of success, and to try to mimic that, and do what they’ve been doing — everyone talks about the team, and I think that for this whole generation, not just like this year’s juniors, but even the older ones as well, there’s that sense of team. I would like, everyone would like, us to be like the girls — they’re really good.”
When asked about their lightheartedness and trying to have fun, both the men and women in the press conference all agreed that this was a big part of their success.
On this subject Diggins said, “I’ve felt for a long time like when I’m having fun is when I actually do race my best, but more importantly I’m also just enjoying what I’m doing.”
Ogden agreed, saying, “I feel like my best races are the ones where I am able to sort of be like light and have some fun, and I find it incredibly fun to be extra, like, loose and make jokes when everybody else is so freaking serious all the time.”
On a more serious note, the American team will, as well as new poles, be showing off a brand new racing suit depicting melting icebergs, as part of a project highlighting climate change. (see above / photo: Leann Bentley for U.S. Ski & Snowboard)
Diggins told the press, “I am very, very proud that we get to wear these suits and this is something that I actually went and campaigned for to include cross-country in these suits, because I think it’s really important that we get to make it about more than just a ski race.”
She continued by saying, “This is the future of our sport and it’s the future of our planet and I think of course we are here to focus on racing and performance, but we’re also trying to be good humans and good teammates and good stewards for our sport. I think it’s really, really meaningful to get to stand up for something that I believe that is right and to get to wear it outwardly on my suit at World Championships, and I think that is really important.”
Schumacher agreed, saying, “A lot of people don’t really care about [environmental issues] that much. We’re still racing and we still get to do this because we have snowmaking and people put a lot of effort into these races which is super cool, but I think the important thing is to remember that when we are talking about this we’re talking about climate change, [which] is a problem for the whole world.”
Trondheim is known for its variable weather, and with fast-changing weather and conditions, skis can often have a determining factor for the outcome of the race. Acknowledging the importance of skis, Schumacher said, “On the bad days you can kind of blame the skis and get away with it and on the good days you can really be thankful to the techs and the skis and know that on middle-of-the-pack skis I probably, maybe, would not have gotten that podium, and that’s fine.”
Diggins had a lot to say about her current approach to transparency on the tech side and how that has changed over the years:
“I think back in the day we used to always say our skis were great,” mused the veteran skier. “We would say our skis were great when we won and then when our skis weren’t great and we had a horrible day we said nothing and we got torn apart in the media — no offense — but it was really tough because it was a one-sided thing. It’s okay to state facts, it’s okay to say — I mean, we’re not running on a track, we’re not swimming in a pool, we have massive variables that are in the control of a lot of different people and everyone’s trying their best every day.”
“I love our tech team to death and they’re trying their best and they love me and they know I’m trying my best. There have been days when they have given me the best skis in the world and I screwed it up.”
“This year in distance races I’ve either won or been off the podium. The skis do matter — it is part of the race and that’s okay to say.”
“I think that it’s a good policy to just be honest. And I think as long as you have the policy of, Hey, when I have a podium the first thing I do is I thank the techs and I say right up there in all my interviews, like, Hey I had great skis today, that was a part of it. But when I have a really bad day and the skis are part of that I’m also going to be honest, because it’s not fair for me to take the brunt of it.
“We need to win as a team and we struggle as a team. It’s not an individual sport that way. We have off days and as techs we have off days and that’s how it is, and it’s not because people aren’t trying or that they don’t care. And I think that’s where it’s not personal. We always try super hard in a race and sometimes we suck. It doesn’t mean that we like just gave up in the middle of the race; some of my hardest races that I’m most proud of I was far off the podium, and I was super proud of those days and it doesn’t mean I can’t be proud of them.”
Racing here starts tomorrow with the men’s and women’s skate sprints. Jessie Diggins, Julia Kern, Rosie Brennan, Kate Oldham, JC Schoonmaker, Ben Ogden, Jack Young, and Gus Schumacher will be racing for the first medals of the championships, hoping to surprise the favorites and make dreams reality.
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 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.
