By Gavin Kentch
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Recent news of Jessie Diggins’s likely retirement, and Therese Johaug’s sort of retirement, has prompted predictable questions as ski fans start to take stock of each woman’s career: How much, if any, does Johaug’s positive doping test in 2016 detract from her legacy? Diggins clearly stands alone as the foremost American cross-country skier of all time, but where does she stack up against other nations’ greats? How many medals would Diggins have by now if the American wax truck could claim the resources of Norway’s? How many would Johaug possess had she not missed a combined three-plus seasons between doping suspension and the first retirement? And so on.
But I think we can all agree that the most important question here is: If you formed a relay team from the members of each woman’s wedding party, who would prevail in a 4 x 5-kilometer relay, assuming an Olympic-level course and the traditional classic–classic–skate–skate format? This is important.
Read on for more.
The rosters: Team Diggins
Diggins was married first, on May 29, 2022, so let’s start with her.
Per her photographer, Sevi Photography:
“Olympic gold medalist Jessie Diggins married her long-time love, Wade [last name apparently immaterial lol; for the record, it is Poplawski], in a breathtaking May wedding at Almquist Farm. Their wedding was a perfect fusion of dreamy garden vibes, vibrant color, and luxe details — an unforgettable day filled with love, emotion, and joy. …
“Nestled in the rolling hills of Hastings, Minnesota, Almquist Farm is a historic family property turned elegant wedding venue. The ceremony took place in a secluded valley, beneath the arching branches of a grand oak tree, creating a romantic, storybook setting.”
Diggins and what’s-his-name, along with their wedding party, are shown in the Instagram post above.
From left to right, distaff attendees only, that is Julia Kern, Anne Hart, Mackenzie Diggins, Sadie Bjornsen Maubet (née Bjornsen), Jessie Diggins, Alayna Sonnesyn, Sophie Caldwell Hamilton (née Caldwell), Katharine Ogden Call (née Ogden), and Danielle Mangine. (Honorable mention: Erika Flowers, now Flowers Newell, was also mentioned in Diggins’s take on relay teams.)
Most of these names are presumptively familiar to readers of the site. Notably, a healthy five women in this photo — Kern, Hart, Maubet, Diggins, and Hamilton — have been named to an Olympic team. There is a not-zero chance that Sonnesyn joins them this season.
Other wedding attendees with Olympic starts included Kikkan Randall, Holly Brooks, Liz Stephen, Ida Sargent, Hannah Halvorsen, Hailey Swirbul, Erik Bjornsen, Gus Schumacher, Ben Ogden, and Noah Hoffman, plus likely another athlete or two whom I couldn’t find evidence of on social media 3.5 years after the fact. I’m assuming that Simi Hamilton and Andy Newell were in attendance along with their better halves, for example. And guests Matt Whitcomb and Jason Cork have a ton of Olympic experience between them, if not race starts per se.
Women in the wedding party who were not professional skiers were Mackenzie Diggins and Danielle Mangine. Mackenzie is Jessie’s younger sister. Mangine and Diggins met in first grade and have been friends ever since; if your storehouse of Diggins lore runs deep enough that you remember her rental car being broken into during an off-season Hawaiian vacation in spring 2017, Mangine was the other person on that trip. Here are high school race results from a decade prior showing both Diggins and Mangine competing for Stillwater (go Ponies!), if you would like a deeper cut than that.
The rosters: Team Johaug
Therese Johaug married Nils Jakob Hoff, a man who contributes one world championship gold (in the double sculls at 2013 World Rowing Championships) to the couple’s combined 24 world champs medals, at Bergstadens Ziir, the historic Trøndelag church in Røros, Norway. The ceremony was held on December 31, 2023, with the after-party stretching well into the new year.
The third slide above shows Johaug and her bridesmaids
Per NRK, in an auto-translated article:
“Two years after they got engaged, the former cross-country skier and rower got married in Bergstadens Ziir in Røros. …
“Present at the wedding were several of Johaug’s former teammates and competitors.
“Charlotte Kalla, Helene Marie Fossesholm, Astrid Uhrenholdt Jacobsen and Ingvild Flugstad Østberg are among those attending the wedding.
“Marit Bjørgen acted as one of Johaug’s three best men [sic]. The other two were Flugstad Østberg and the bride’s younger sister Veronica Johaug.”
My social media stalking suggests that other World Cup skiers at the wedding included Maiken Caspersen Falla, Kari Øyre Slind, and Maria Strøm Nakstad. I didn’t run the full math on the attendees’ collective palmarès, but Johaug and Bjørgen alone present a combined 21 Olympic medals, 49 World Championship medals, and 344 individual World Cup podiums, which is frankly obscene. But there are four athletes on a relay team, not just two, and there’s a reason you play the games.
If you would like a deep dive on Johaug’s dresses for the day, Vogue Scandinavia has got you covered on the wedding dress per se, while Norwegian fashion blog MinMote took a look at the afterparty dress. Yes, Johaug wore Moon Boots (white, of course) for her arrival at the church. An outré choice, but Johaug, to put it mildly, had the confidence to pull it off.
Embed from Getty ImagesTeam naming
I put the issue of team makeup to Diggins over the summer, phrasing it with the gravity that the subject matter deserves (“very important and serious question,” read my email subject line). Diggins, who clearly seemed delighted by the query, responded:
“In no particular order, two full relay teams plus amazing support from our wedding party!
“I can’t really speak to Wade’s side as they’re more likely to field a hockey team than a 4 person skiing relay. :)”
Diggins’s take on team makeup was: Sophie–Sadie–Julia–Jessie for one team, and KO–Alayna–Annie–Erika for the other. I know she said “in no particular order,” but Sophie took the scramble leg in Pyeongchang in 2018, Sadie held down the second classic leg for virtually all of her career, and Jessie has been the team’s closer for well over a decade, so, candidly, that feels like a pretty considered order to me.
Diggins added: “Mackenzie: one woman hype team, plus sassy social media coverage. Danielle: medical support as she’s going through her residency right now!”
Shoutout to Diggins for recognizing the importance of the team behind the team.
Embed from Getty ImagesIf we cabin the inquiry to just the wedding party per se, then Team Johaug’s options are, in full, Therese Johaug, Marit Bjørgen, Ingvild Flugstad Østberg, and “the bride’s younger sister Veronica Johaug.” That’s three-fourths of a murderers’ row, plus more of a dark horse. Let’s see who goes where for Norway.
Johaug was on the Norwegian relay team at three Olympics and eight World Championships, taking home seven medals in 11 starts. She skied the second leg, where teams traditionally place their strongest classic skier, eight times in those 11 races, so let’s slot her in for leg two.
Bjørgen was on the Norwegian relay team a staggering 13 times at global championships, taking home medals as early as Salt Lake in 2002 and as late as Pyeongchang in 2018, plus an additional eight times in between. She skied the anchor leg nine times, with her last non-anchor position (one of the two classic legs) coming in 2009, so let’s put her on the anchor leg here.
Poor Østberg’s name feels like it should be Ingvild Flugstad “tragic figure” Østberg by this point, given that health and body composition issues have kept her from skiing up to her potential for quite some time now. That said, Østberg at her best was very good indeed, winning both the crystal globe and the Tour de Ski in the 2018/2019 season and featuring on three global championship relay teams (three starts, three medals).
Østberg took, well, legs one, two, and three once each in those three races, so that’s not particularly dispositive. Turning to the World Cup, Østberg was on eight winning relay teams there between 2015 and 2020. She was clearly a strong utility player, skiing leg one three times, leg two twice, leg three once, and leg four twice. While that is a pretty even distribution, strictly speaking her greatest number of starts was on leg one, plus we still need a scramble skier for Team Johaug, so let’s put Østberg there.
Your teams are therefore, in order:
- Ingvild Flugstad Østberg
- Therese Johaug
- Veronica Johaug
- Marit Bjørgen
for Norway, and
- Sophie Caldwell Hamilton
- Sadie Bjornsen Maubet
- Julia Kern
- Jessie Diggins
for the United States.
Notably, every single woman on this list save Veronica Johaug has started an Olympic relay for her country, lending a note of gravitas to this otherwise frivolous thought experiment. Sort of relatedly, the DJ at Sadie’s wedding (at an Anchorage mountain venue) is a friend; he once told me that he’d never seen so many freakishly fit people dancing for so long at a wedding. And they say that cross-country skiing has little to do with functional fitness.
Form charts
Assume that every athlete chosen here is racing at the height of her powers. While a “retired” Marit Bjørgen, currently 45 years old, could wipe the floor with me, you, or most people reading this site in a race held right now, I want to make this an apples-to-apples comparison. So let’s posit that everyone listed above is skiing as fast as she ever has. Yes this is a somewhat terrifying proposition, given the athletic firepower involved here.
The race itself clearly comes down to how good of a skier Veronica Johaug is. I think that Østberg is objectively faster than Hamilton, particularly over 5km; Hamilton’s best individual World Cup finish in anything longer than a sprint was ninth, in a 3km prologue, while Østberg won multiple distance races, including a 5km classic. Put another way, in a 2016 World Cup relay — in which, it must be said, the U.S. finished second — Østberg put 27.9 seconds into Hamilton over the scramble leg. So that’s advantage Norway through leg one.
Leg two features Therese Johaug in a classic race versus… well, it doesn’t really matter how that sentence ends, because Johaug in a classic race, at her best, wins that race going away (and I say this as a massive Sadie stan). It was true in 2011 when Johaug was winning the 10km classic pursuit in Ruka, and it was true in 2025 when she was winning the 50km mass start classic in Lahti. By over a minute. At the halfway point, Norway has only stretched its advantage over the U.S.
(Let’s table leg three for a second, so that there is some sense of suspense while I talk about Diggins vs. Bjørgen. And also sneak in a photo of my cat.)
As for the anchor leg, Jessie Diggins vs. Marit Bjørgen… this feels like borderline heresy for someone who has named his cat Marit, but Diggins at her best was the best athlete in the world over a 5km skate (could still be, for all I know, but the women no longer race that distance) (yes I know about the schedule for this year’s Tour de Ski). She won this race format on the World Cup a handful of times… including, in one instance, over Bjørgen. By 15.8 seconds. Over 5km. In Norway. So I give Diggins the edge here.
But by how much? It has to be said that Bjørgen was 36 years old in that 5km linked to above, to Diggins’s 25, and that performance over these shorter distances will wane long before 30km strength does. Earlier in Bjørgen’s career, for example, she won interval-start 5km races by 17 seconds and 23 seconds. I’m gonna let my home-team bias show here and still give the nod to Diggins, but let’s say that her advantage is only 10 seconds over 5km.
So we have Team Johaug up by, let’s say, as much as a full minute over the two classic legs, with the Team Diggins eponym clawing back just 10 seconds over the anchor leg.
The gravamen is therefore, Is Julia Kern fifty seconds faster than Therese Johaug’s little sister over five kilometers?
Unless Veronica Johaug is the world’s greatest hidden talent, the answer has to be “clearly no.” Veronica Johaug has never had a FIS license. This 2010 profile of middle sibling Karstein Johaug states that Veronica “likes to work out and stay fit but doesn’t particularly enjoy competing.” I don’t readily find results for her in local citizen races.
In conclusion, Kern comes from behind on leg three, moving the Americans from nearly a minute back into an insurmountable lead. Diggins solos home for the win. Johaug, distraught, vows to add Charlotte Kalla to her bridal party for a future vows renewal ceremony so that it is more of a fair fight next time. She cries herself to sleep on a pillow made from the ribbons of her 23 world championships medals while plotting revenge.
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