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By Devin L. Ward, PhD
The 20th annual Tour de Ski ends with a 10-kilometer skate race up the Alpe Cermis, which has been a mass start in recent years. I got on my soapbox about this last year, so I’ll keep my thoughts short here: Formatting the final climb as a mass start rather than a pursuit makes it more interesting (in my opinion), especially when the leader of the Tour de Ski overall is more or less a done deal.
Speaking of the overall leader being well established: Yes, Jessie Diggins won the Tour de Ski again this year (her third win of 14 total appearances in the Tour), surprising no one and continuing to demonstrate that she’s in excellent shape.
The mass start supports a shift in focus to both who is the wiliest mountain goat and to some other interesting sub-races:
1. The purple climbing bib (before the race, Teresa Stadlober led Diggins by only two points in the Tour climbing standings after Frida Karlsson withdrew this morning)
2. The silver sprint bib (after yesterday, Maja Dahlqvist is separated by three points over Nadine Fähndrich and Johanna Hagström)
3. The fight for second through fifth overall
4. And of course: The battle within each individual athlete questioning why they would put themselves up to this race.
After a relatively conservative strategy in yesterday’s classic sprint, Diggins made it clear she was not going to rest on her +1:19 gap on the field in the overall Tour de Ski standings and immediately began pushing the pace today.
Dahlqvist hung onto Diggins and the handful of initial leaders (including Ebba Andersson and Heidi Weng among others), hunting down the last sprint bib points. Approaching the time point at about 7 kilometers, Dahlqvist fought to break away to safely secure the sprint bib without a doubt.
Fähndrich attempted to follow, with Hagström behind her, but was caught behind other athletes in the narrow section of the trail (bib 11 put her starting behind Dahlqvist in bib 2) and could not catch Dahlqvist. Thus, the sprint ranking for the Tour de Ski remained the same: Dahlqvist in first, Fähndrich in second, Hagström in third.
Having passed the time point, Hagström stopped skiing briefly and took a quick break (I’m not judging here, this is completely fair).
Diggins took the lead again as the climb began, moving with Andersson, Karoline Simpson-Larsen, Heidi Weng, Nora Sanness, and Nadja Kälin of Switzerland. With two kilometers to go they were skiing with a fairly relentless rhythm and dropped Kälin, who joined the follow pack.
This turned out to be a good indicator that the pace was toughening as the lead pack began to disperse and splinter. Stadlober somehow began making moves to advance up out of the chase pack while on some of the steepest gradient of the course. Skiing like a woman possessed, she met Sanness as Sanness dropped back. The Virtual Tour graphic showed that Stadlober’s “beast mode” climbing gear had moved her into competition with Weng for second in the tour overall.
This began a nail-biting and very exciting few minutes where Weng and Stadlober swapped back and forth for second and third repeatedly. Up ahead, Simpson-Larsen and Weng were battling for the not-virtual lead of the climb, having pulled away from Andersson and Diggins. Their battle continued until the course flattened a bit in the final few hundred meters. At this point, Simpson-Larsen pulled away from Weng, showing that either she had saved a bit in the tank or that Weng had not, to win the final climb.
Diggins reeled Weng in as they approached the line. This brought her into second place on the day, handily wrapping up her overall Tour win and also giving her what surely must be her best final climb performance to date. But what about Stadlober? Her gritty moves paid off as she took second in the overall, ahead of Weng in third. Stadlober also grabbed enough points today to win the climbing bib, six points ahead of Diggins.
You may remember that in my piece yesterday, I quoted Diggins saying that, “You literally have no idea how you’re going to feel until you are a third of the way into the climb.”
So, how did Diggins feel in the climb today? “I was telling myself, like, I will never do this again,” she said. “So it gave me a little extra motivation. And I just — you never know how you’re gonna feel every day of the tour. And I was like, Wow I feel really good today.”
Diggins added that this was the best she had ever felt on the final climb. She recalled telling teammate Julia Kern after the race, “I think I forgot what it is to just feel good in this time because the last two years I’ve been so injured that I was in so much pain outside of racing. So for it to be only painful during the race was, like, Wow, that’s kind of nice.”
She continued, “I’m done [with the Tour]. Forever. No, it was an awesome tour. We had such amazing help from so many people. Such great cheering today. We’ve had an amazing team vibe, great energy, and I’ve had great skis every day of the tour. And it really takes everything from everyone to need to happen. […] I’m just so thankful for my team. It was so fun to close it down with a good one today. It will be a great team celebration tonight.”
When asked by media on the ground about her burst of speed at the end of the race, she said, “I was trying to be smart and safe in terms of the overall tour. And then when I realized we were close enough, I thought, Okay, now I can empty the tank. But I have paced it badly before where I blow up and that last 600 meters is the slowest of your life. And so I was trying to ski it smart and make sure I was dying at the right moment.”
Diggins was also asked to comment on the big picture, to which she responded, “Honestly, the Tour de Ski is one of the hardest things to win. To be honest, because when we won the Olympics, it’s amazing, it’s really special, but that’s one race. And the tour is day after day after day after day after day. You have to put it together back to back. You have to be on and you have to keep together under cumulative pressure. And that is really hard. It’s hard on you and it’s hard on the team. And so I am so proud of the team.”
To wrap up the remaining loose ends, Julia Kern finished 14th in the race today and 16th in the overall; this was the best overall Tour de Ski finish of her career. Finally a shoutout to 20-year-old Canadian Alison Mackie for finishing 12th in the Tour, capped by a stellar eighth in the final climb.
The next World Cup race weekend is January 17–18th in Oberhof, Germany. We will see a skate sprint and 10-kilometer interval-start. The pre-Olympics races in Period 3 are often the red-headed stepchild of the World Cup calendar; stay tuned to see how these races fit into the Olympic plans of athletes who will be racing in Italy next month, and the non-Olympic plans of athletes who will not be. You can check out our coverage of U.S. Nationals to see who is in line for these starts from the domestic field (after one race: APU).
Results: stage six | Tour de Ski overall | Tour de Ski sprint bib | Tour de Ski climber’s bib
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