By Angie Kell
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Sports are magical, aren’t they? They teach us things such as teamwork, discipline, leadership, and time management, and keep us attuned to how our bodies are feeling and how to keep them healthy — both physically and mentally.
What became clear, after listening to the final Jessie Diggins preseason press conference, was that all the things Diggins has learned from her tenure as a professional nordic skier are in fact what’s preparing her so well for her impending retirement, following this 2025/2026 World Cup and Olympic season.
Most notably, her ability to aspire to brand-new career and personal goals in a post–World Cup world, and her prowess in managing the expectations and pressure placed on her once it’s announced that “Jessie Diggins will do this,” are things she learned on her way to becoming the most decorated American cross-country skier in history.
Diggins began Thursday’s press conference by stating up front what she aspires to do in her post-retirement phrase of life: “One of the things I’m super excited about is continuing to do my best to be the best role model that I can be in inspiring people … but through keynote speaking.”
Diggins wishes to capitalize on what she’s learned from her lengthy and successful career, road bumps and all, to maintain her status as a role model in sport, and to inspire others through her speaking. “It’s all about storytelling and leaving people with this little piece of you, and having them go home and be like, ‘Wow, I’m going to approach [this] differently. I’m going to think about this differently,’” she said.
Undoubtedly, her public struggles with mental health will be fuel for and harnessed for this inspiration — but will doubly serve to quell her nerves when faced with a large group of people in her audience. Diggins addressed why being a role model has become so important in the mental health sphere. “That’s the thing that I was like, Man, 18-year-old Jessie needed that so bad,” she said. “And I think if I had felt less alone and isolated when I was 18, I think I would have hopefully asked for help sooner, and I wouldn’t have suffered quite so bad.”
Her aspirations in this new life also include some non-skiing athletic goals. Diggins announced, “One thing I’ve wanted to do for a really long time is to run 100 miles. It lights up my soul, and I’m really excited to still give myself these challenges that really inspire me and light me up but maybe don’t involve quite so much travel.” While this news is unsurprising to some after seeing Diggins race the Triple Crown at the Broken Arrow Skyrace in North Lake Tahoe this past summer, it did beg questions of, Is she going to go all in? Is she going to shift her tenacity in cross-country skiing to become the best ultra runner in the country?
Diggins has learned throughout her career how to manage expectations in questions such as these, logical or not, both for herself and for her fans. She exercised this skill when she stated, “I don’t expect to run these 100 miles quickly or competitively. I just want to do it for me. I’m not trying to be a competitive runner. I’m just doing this for me, because it’s fun. So the training is going to be pretty chill, I think.” No doubt this mentality will serve to alleviate any sort of pressure her presence might earn in a 100-mile race.
Diggins’s maturity and growth from navigating a professional skiing career were also evinced later in the press conference, when she discussed relishing key moments throughout her final season but not experiencing pressure in making it be the perfect final experience. “I get to say thank you every time I leave a race venue,” she noted. “I’m not just thanking the volunteers. I’m like. ‘Thank you, because this the last time you’re going to take my skis after a race and take my bib and take my timing chip, and that’s really special.’”
She continued, “There’s definitely some things I want to do off the snow, like visit certain little cafés that I love, and see friends on and off the race circuit, because I won’t get to travel the world the same way anymore, so I want to make sure I get to enjoy those things, but at the same time, I don’t want to put pressure on myself to make everything so incredibly special and magical. You can also just be ordinary, and then it’s special because it’s part of your life, and it’s the last time.”
While the upcoming World Cup season and the 2026 Winter Olympics will keep Diggins in the spotlight for the foreseeable future, there is no doubt she is well equipped to start anew with different pressures in the next phase of her life. Sports are so often the conduit to personal growth and character development, and Diggins’s professional career, plus an eye to what follows, together epitomize that very sentiment.
You can listen to the entire press conference below if you would like. Here is a summary and outline of what was discussed (I couldn’t get it to add in time stamps, sorry). Massive disclosure, this is entirely AI-generated, but candidly this feels like a pretty good use case for the technology, so I am comfortable hosting it here. But the computer did this, not me.
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