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By Noah Eckstein
And with that, the lead-up to the Olympics is over. Sunday’s 20-kilometer mass start classic race in Goms marked the final opportunity, in competition at least, for athletes to lay the foundation for their upcoming campaigns for quadrennial glory. Olympic teams have now been named, so the overarching drama surrounding selection had largely evaporated and the racing today was simple — for fitness, possibly for World Cup points if your name is Jessie or Moa, and for the win.
Claiming that win, her first on the World Cup, was Johanna Matintalo of Finland. Joining her on the podium were Jessie Diggins, in second, and Astrid Øyre Slind, in third.
The race began under blue skies, freshly dusted conifers framing the views up and down the gorgeous alpine valley and Swiss flags out in force. “The Swiss fans have been singing and banging their bells since we got here,” American Kendall Kramer reported after the race, “so safe to say they are enthusiastic!”
The first few kilometers saw a handful of hopefuls slide to the front, Moa Ilar of Sweden, Caterina Ganz of Italy, and Nora Sanness of Norway each taking a turn. By the beginning of the fan-lined A-climb punctuating the middle of the 5-kilometer lap, though — familiar from the past two days of sprint racing — the real contenders made their intent known early. Slind, doing her long-limbed, low-tempo, loping-antelope thing, came around to the front and drilled it. Diggins, just behind, momentarily watched a gap crack open before opting into this ambitious early break.
By the top of the climb, at around 2.5km, the pair had almost five seconds on the field. Over the back half of the first lap, they pushed it up to ten or twelve, Slind doing the majority of the work and both gliding on fast skis. The gap started shrinking again as Diggins took over the pacemaking through the lap, with the Russian skier Dariya Nepryaeva, racing as a neutral athlete, pulling the chase back into contention.
The chase group latched back on for good at the 6.5km mark. With the pace not dropping much and Slind still striding imperiously at the front, the group was cut down to eight skiers in short order — Diggins, Slind, Nepryaeva, Karoline Simpson-Larsen (NOR), Katharina Hennig Dotzler (GER, and sporting a new name since her marriage last April), Kerttu Niskanen (FIN), Johanna Matintalo (FIN), and Linn Svahn (SWE). Over the remainder of the second lap, Simpson-Larsen moved to the front to help Slind with the pacemaking while Svahn dangled at the tail end of the group for a while before slowly sliding backward into no-woman’s land.
At the 10km mark, both the leaders and a thick soup of fog rolled into the stadium. Snow conditions, already difficult with tracks glazing under strong sun on exposed parts of the course, got even more complicated.
Just thirty seconds behind, the battle for the U23 green leader’s jersey took on a more tangible dimension as Canadian Alison Mackie, leading the category, and Leonie Perry of France, sitting not far behind her in third, fell back from the chase pack and skied along side-by-side in 12th and 13th.
Around 12km, Nepryaeva’s early work bringing the race back together began to show, and she dropped backward toward Svahn roughly 10 seconds behind. With a lap and a half to ski, the remainder of the front group would contest the win.
At the 14.2km prime, Diggins pulled through to collect the full 15 World Cup points on offer, adding to the 15 she’d taken a lap before. She now leads the World Cup overall by 223 points over Moa Ilar, 11th today, due in part to a very busy race schedule over the first half of the season (and in other part to her racing damn fast this year). This is up substantially from a lead of 160 points following yesterday’s racing; even by Diggins’s lofty standards, this was an impressive 24 hours.
These points were one of the reasons Diggins chased Slind off the front from the gun. “I don’t regret following Slind on the early break,” she said in an audio message to Nordic Insights. “I was trying to accomplish two goals today: I really wanted to put myself in the best position possible for the bonus points, and also I wasn’t really sure what was going to happen — would the break work, would it not? You never really know, but you miss all the opportunities that you don’t take.”
Notably, some of Diggins’s biggest competitors for the distance races at the upcoming Olympics are conspicuously out of the running for the crystal globe, and were conspicuously missing from today’s start list. Swedes Ebba Andersson and Frida Karlsson, who together took all three individual distance golds at World Championships in Trondheim last year, have ten and nine World Cup starts so far this year, respectively. Their compatriot Jonna not-just-a-sprinter Sundling has nine. Perennial championship weapon Heidi Weng, of Norway, has 10. Diggins has 18. If anyone can balance a crystal globe–caliber race load with Olympic glory, she’s definitely the one, but the human body can only do so much.
Diggins, though, is confident in her approach. “Balancing prioritizing the Olympics and the overall ranking, I’m definitely prioritizing the Olympics,” she elaborated to us. “I don’t know if you could tell in the race but I was absolutely dead at the finish — it’s been a huge training week. Just because I’m racing doesn’t mean I stopped with the training in preparation for the Olympics. I just see these as tuneup and, honestly, really great hard efforts. You can’t mimic that kind of intensity any other way except racing. For me, racing a lot has always been a really important part of my plan and my build, and I know my body responds really well to that.”
Through the final lap, Simpson-Larson and Slind continued driving at the front. Diggins, starting to drop her shoulders and scramble on the climbs, was mostly at the back. Up the final sprint hill by the stadium, Matintalo charged forward, Diggins pulling from her endless well of energy to cling to her tails. Simpson-Larson faded back with Slind filling the gap. Matintalo, Diggins, and Slind, in that order, took a small gap over the top and into the final descent, preparing for a three-up sprint.
From the front, Matintalo opened up her doublepole early and left no doubt, opening up clear air behind. Slind pulled back a few feet from Diggins in the closing moments but couldn’t come around.
In her winner’s interview, Matintalo was stoked. “Finally! [I’ve] been pretty close to being on the podium many times this season… and now first win, so I’m very happy,” she said.
Her inconspicuous approach today, barely putting her face in the wind until the sprint, may not have been entirely strategic. “The first lap I felt quite terrible after yesterday,” she continued. “It was a hard day, with four heats in the sprint [she finished fourth], and I was thinking, will I make it to the finish? But during the race it started to feel better and better and I decided to put all in for the last uphill.” Patience pays off!
Diggins was happy with this coda to the first half of the season, and, as usual, focused her praise on her team. “I realized my strength today was going to be the climbs because I had really amazing kick,” she reflected. “Which, by the way, was incredibly impressive — it was really tricky trying to figure out what to do before the race. I communicated to my tech, Cork, that I just needed kick at all costs because I knew that’s where I would bleed the most time. So I was really, really grateful to him for just figuring that out, and he just gave me skis that I needed in order to get the job done. I was just so grateful and so impressed.”
Diggins’s podium was not the only highlight of a solid day for the American women. Julia Kern was the first of four other women who joined her in the top thirty, and was content with how she and the team handled tricky waxing and thin air.
“Today I felt pretty good,” she said in an audio message. “I knew it was going to be a really hilly and hard race, especially with the new snow — it wasn’t very fast out there. I was happy with how I felt. Given that we’re almost at altitude but not quite, I wasn’t really sure how much I could surge and risk it without risking an epic blowup on the last lap. So I was a little bit between two packs and playing that game of, do I go with the pack in front of me or behind me, and kind of threading the needle between both.”
“The tracks were glazy but also powdery,” she reported, “so it was a really tricky waxing day, and our techs did an amazing job creating skis that kicked really well. Definitely not an easy condition with the new snow, and then the sun coming out and baking it, and then freezing fog coming in, so it was definitely a challenge out there. But they did an amazing job and my skis felt great.”
Signs are pointing in the right direction for Kern after a slow start to the season. “I feel really good about my distance form,” she said. “I’ve been consistently putting down great distance results and I think that’s really encouraging going into the Games, knowing that I’m fit and that just the last bits of fine-tuning are left. It’s fun to be able to race well both in distance and in sprint.
Hailey Swirbul, who started literally last in the field wearing bib 58, picked off dozens of athletes over the 20 kilometers to finish 25th. In her first World Cup mass start since March of 2023, this is a pretty sweet result. “I am proud that I kept good focus through the whole race and tried to pick people off slowly,” she wrote to Nordic Insights. “I really appreciated having Novie in sight ahead of me for the last part of the race, and I got to watch her beautiful skiing to inspire me to keep kicking up those hills as I started getting really tired!”
Novie McCabe used that beautiful skiing to roll in just ahead in 22nd. Also navigating a full World Cup mass start field for the first time in well over a year, she reflected on the different degree of intensity compared to her domestic racing earlier this season.
“It definitely feels like a bit of a shock to be back to World Cup mass starts,” she said in an audio message. “They go out really fast and I think that will for sure take some getting used to. I think I just need to get used to it being really hard from the gun, and kind of practice staying calm when it is really hard from the gun.
“But it was fun,” McCabe continued, “and I think, honestly, it was kind of nice that I started in the back because it did allow for me to go out a little bit slower and then work into the race more slowly, which I think was kind of nice on this course because there were a lot of opportunities to blow up. Definitely will take some getting used to but this felt like a nice little step forward.”
It also marked a moment of growing capability outside her typical wheelhouse of striding. “I was really happy with my doublepole today,” McCabe said. “I feel like usually in classic races I’m kind of just waiting for the hills and wishing that the doublepole would end, and today my doublepoling actually felt pretty strong, so I was proud of that.”
And not far behind McCabe and Swirbul was Kendall Kramer, who finished 27th. This result was just the latest in an upward trajectory this season. “I have been feeling like a really mature skier this year,” she wrote to Nordic Insights, “but in a packed field so maybe people can’t see it so much on a results sheet! The energy has been great, I’ve been recovering quickly, and my mentality is strong. I intend to bring it through the Games and Lake Placid!”
“The course today was entertaining, snow was glazing, so a lot of kick was necessary” she went on. “I was happy to find a good position from the beginning of the race and slowly move up; feeling good the whole time and being in a group the entire time was helpful.”
For the Canadians, Mackie skied an impressive race and held on for 13th, building her lead for the green bib. This was also her first top-15 in a traditional format, following a fifth place in the Tour de Ski 5-kilometer heats race and an eighth place in the Alpe Cermis climb a few days later. Katherine Stewart-Jones was not far behind in 20th.
Americans Rosie Brennan and Sammy Smith came in together in 40th and 41st, respectively.
High-level racing resumes on February 7th when the Olympic cross-country ski events begin with the women’s 20-kilometer skiathlon. See you then!
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