By Gavin Kentch
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Jessie Diggins last did a 5-kilometer mass start skate race, on my research, during her senior year of high school, when the Stillwater Area phenom was dueling Annie Hart of St. Paul Academy throughout the 2009/2010 season.
Sixteen years later, Diggins has still got it, winning the first, and last, 5km mass start skate FIS race of her career earlier Wednesday. This one happened to come in Toblach, during stage three of the Tour de Ski, which Diggins now leads by 50 seconds over Astrid Øyre Slind of Norway. I was going to say that this is rather a grander stage, but candidly there are probably more spectators at Giants Ridge each February than there were on course in Italy today, so who knows.
If you’re wondering how they fit the 81 remaining women’s starters in the Tour de Ski into a single 5km course and made it fair… they didn’t. There were four heats today, populated per an obscure but orderly system found deep within the ICR document. Diggins raced in heat number three. The other American woman still in the tour, Julia Kern, was in heat number two. Slind, likely Diggins’s closest remaining competition for the overall Tour de Ski win, was also in heat number two.
So was there a huge amount of inter-heat strategy out there today, and cagey clock-watching of the other races before athletes went to the line? Not really.
“What’s nice is it was just 5km,” Diggins told reporters afterwards. “And so after watching the men, you were like, Okay, you’re going to gain or lose ten seconds on the tour. But the big thing was to just have a really fast heat.”
How did they get this? Teamwork. “What I thought was so cool and fun was feeling the camaraderie,” Diggins recounted. “So I was talking to all the girls beforehand, like, Okay, team number three, we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna go fast and we’re gonna change leads. … So I said, Okay, I’ll go out first, and then when I blow up, you can go. And we had really great teamwork out there, and I think that’s why we had a really fast heat.”
Subject to some polite skepticism about Diggins ever really truly blowing up today, this is… pretty much exactly what happened in her race.
Twenty athletes took their positions in the start pen. There was what felt, even through a screen, like an agonizingly long wait, the tension standing in start contrast to the levity Diggins had brought to bear just moments before when she wished (longtime teammate and current color commentator) Kikkan Randall happy birthday when the camera had lingered on her during pre-race introductions.
Finally, the gun went off, and skiers surged forward. Diggins went out like it was a sprint qual, instantly stringing out the field. By a minute into the race, athletes were skiing single file. Diggins began and ended the day in the yellow Tour de Ski leader’s bib, so I can’t really talk about the virtual maillot jaune as they do in the Tour de France. But, tellingly, she was already three seconds up on Slind’s leg-two pace by this point in the race.
Around the 1:40 mark, Diggins slowed slightly. Moa Ilar of Sweden came into the lead, as had been foretold. Diggins dropped back, into fourth, and then into sixth, conserving energy. “Chilling out there,” read my notes from this portion of the broadcast. This is clearly a little flippant — everyone was still skiing hard — but it clearly is to Diggins’s credit that she could claim this much recovery in a race that she won in less than 11 minutes.
By the 3:30 mark, rest time was over. Eva Ingebrigtsen of Norway pushed hard to claim the sprint bonus 1.7km in, and just… kept on drilling it. The lead pack instantly splintered. Diggins responded by dragging folks up to the front, where she once more slowed things down a little. This is your 2010 Minnesota state high school champion (and 2007, and 2008) in action, folks.
(Ingebrigtsen would ultimately finish 40.4 seconds back of Diggins. I award her the “most combative” jersey on the day, just to stick with the cycling references here.)
The largest climb of the course, by a substantial margin, came at roughly the 6:30 mark of the 11-minute race. Diggins led a field of roughly a dozen athletes into the A-Climb. She was in the lead at the base of the hill, and again at the top. She then skied the downhill well, because of course she did. No snark there with that phrasing; Diggins has for several years now been the class of the women’s field when it comes to gaining speed on working downhills. Her podium track record in Toblach speaks to this.
But there is also still some strategy there. Coming into the final kilometer, Diggins backed off slightly, letting Ilar and teammate Emma Ribom come past. She adroitly used their draft as they drew closer to the finish. There were still a dozen athletes in striking distance 500 meters out from the line.
Diggins waited until the final small uphill leading into the stadium, and then just… skied away from the Swedish women’s sprint team (and others). She increased her tempo to chipmunk-like levels, V2ing further up the hill than anyone else (all of whom, again, are world-class skiers). She transitioned into a vicious jumpskate that no one could follow. The whole thing was ragged as hell, and yet also deeply effective: She crested the hill with a lead, worked the ensuing downhill to extend that lead, and came into the finish lanes all alone.
Diggins would win by 5.5 seconds over Ribom, with Ilar in third 6.9 seconds back, virtually all of that margin coming over the final half-kilometer. It was, candidly, just about what you would have foreseen coming into the day, Diggins skiing skillfully within the pack before moving to the front near the end and powering away for the win. It was an outcome all the more impressive for its predictability: Doing what you want to do, even when the rest of the field presumably has a pretty darn good sense for what you want to do, takes skill.
“it was really fun,” said Diggins of her day. “It was fast. It was a super fast course, fast snow, had really fast skis — so thank you to our team and Salomon.”
“The whole team was in a really good spot” after seeing Gus Schumacher win the men’s race a few hours earlier, Diggins said. “And then I was really excited to work together with the girls in our heat. We had a good strategy, a good plan. We all worked together, and we were just going really hard.”
Diggins said, of an unprecedented day for American skiing, “I’m so proud of Gus and everyone on the team. I think it was a great day for the team as a whole, and just so, so proud of him and so happy for him.”
Diggins is getting the lion’s share of attention here because she, you know, won the race; it was her 29th individual World Cup win, and 73rd individual podium. But Julia Kern had a superb day as well, impressive on the merits but doubly so after her rough start to the Tour de Ski, slash maybe entire 2025/2026 World Cup season, so far.
Kern came into the day wearing bib no. 38, sitting 2:30 behind Diggins’s overall leader bib. She started from the middle of the pack in the second heat. But she wasn’t there for long, moving herself up into the tail of the lead group shortly into the race.
Kern stayed in contention for the heat win throughout the stage, leading the field into the final climb. She had spent more matches in the early going than the athletes around her, and was ultimately unable to hold off Maja Dahlqvist to the line, finishing 0.9 seconds back of the Swede (and, ultimately 10.7 seconds back of Diggins on the day; Kern is tenth overall in today’s results). But the day marked a strong turnaround for Kern after the opening days of the Tour de Ski saw her finish 17th in stage one and 41st in stage two.
“One of the things I love about the Tour de Ski is that the next day you always have another chance to race,” Kern told Nordic Insights afterwards.
“And the other thing I love about the Tour de Ski is every year there’s some sort of magic that happens during it where the early part of the season often doesn’t go super well and then there’s a stage where just things start to click. And that happened for me today. And I’m really excited about that. I was patiently trusting the process, hoping that and believing that in the Tour that day will come, and hopefully I can carry that momentum forward. I do well with a lot of racing and this time of year things start to come together, and so I treat every day as a new opportunity and a clean slate.”
I had specifically asked Kern if she learned anything by going second on the day; the first women’s heat went off roughly two hours after the final men’s race.
She certainly had: “Most definitely,” Kern said. “Jessie and I watched all four heats this morning and saw that you had to drive the pace from beginning to end, stay out of trouble, and that the times were going to be really close. So there was a lot to learn. We also talked to the men’s team, so they had some helpful insights as well.”
Racing continues tomorrow with stage four, the fourth and final stage of this year’s Tour de A Small Swath Of Northern Italy to be contested in Toblach. It will be a 20-kilometer classic race with a pursuit start.
Diggins will go out first, reflecting her status as the overall tour leader. Slind follows second, 50 seconds later, with Moa Ilar third, ten seconds after Slind. First woman across the line wins.
Look for classic maestro Teresa Stadlober (fifth, 1:14 back) to animate the chase pack, although I personally suspect that, with this course and her current classic form — Monday was arguably the best classic race of Diggins’s career, a superb showing for an athlete who as far back as July 2010 was telling interviewers, “I’ve never had as much confidence in classic as I do in skate” — Diggins will win yet again. Stay tuned.
Kern will start in bib 32, 2:40 back of Diggins. She will potentially have some company from the 40-plus athletes all starting in the wave, six seconds behind her, but will have Alison Mackie of Canada starting four seconds ahead of her to serve as a rabbit. Again, stay tuned.
And finally, speaking of classic pursuit starts following a 5km skate, please enjoy this archival footage from the 2010 Minnesota state meet (content warning: Train):
This 15-year-old YouTube comment on the original video, from user @Landerson_voyageur, has aged well: “Jessie is so beast that at the smaller races (generally between roseville, stillwater & 1 or 2 other schools from our confrence) she will skii against the boys team & win.”
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