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By Peter Minde
LAKE PLACID — Thursday in Lake Placid: cloudy, humid, and raw. Having gradually filtered in since Monday, the whole World Cup contingent is now here. Skiers are learning the courses; technicians are testing skis. On Thursday afternoon, the U.S. Ski Team made Jessie Diggins, Gus Schumacher, and Ben Ogden available for a press conference.
As we waited for them to arrive, Kikkan Randall came into the room, carrying her skis and poles. Once a Fischer athlete, always a Fischer athlete. She kindly gave some time to chat with Nordic Insights.
Nordic Insights: First and foremost, how are conditions?
“I have a healthy respect for the course now that I’ve skied it myself,” Randall said. “There’s some big climbs out there; it’s going to be challenging. The weather this week has been warm, but it’s now cooling down and getting some fresh snow. With the late start times, hopefully the air temperature will stabilize. It’s going to be technical in the downhills, as much as it’s going to be aerobic on the uphills.”
When you first saw Jessie, did you see her potential?
“I went home for a brief period in 2008 in the middle of the World Cup season, and they were hosting Junior Nationals in Anchorage,” Randall said. “I went out to watch one of the races, and I saw this girl ski by with this floppy ponytail. And I just remember thinking, Wow, I like her energy.”
“Now, the energy was going every which way. She was very raw at that point, but then a couple years later, she showed up on the World Championship team with us. She was the little sister on the team for a lot of times. And I think she took some growing up and figuring out, but I think we always knew the potential was there. It’s been really fun to see her refine it to a really professional level, and then to transition into being the mentor on the team for the younger athletes.”
You were a leader of this team for a long time. How does one inspire others to take the leadership reins?
“What’s kind of cool, when our women’s team was forming, Matt Whitcomb was our women’s coach at the time, and we had started to see some good collaboration happening,” Randall said.
“He challenged us [on] how we were going to approach leadership on the team. We envisioned that it was going to take everybody contributing in their own way. Some people lead naturally, but we knew it was going to be equally important for some of the quieter members to lead in their own way.
“When I was the lead veteran on the team, Jessie was still very much leading in her way. As Jessie transitions out now, a lot of what we created as a women’s team, you’re now seeing in the men’s team, in the way that they collaborate and work together. What’s cool is we’ve created this continuum that’s not dependent on any one person. It’s an ethos, it’s a culture. Jessie’s played an important role in that, but now she hands the torch to someone else.”
Below are excerpts from the press conference. Some of the replies have been lightly edited for clarity. I’ve focused on Diggins’s responses. Gavin will put up audio of the entire press conference in the near future [see end of article].
Asked in the press conference how she would define her legacy, Diggins replied, “I think I define my legacy completely outside of race results. I’m really proud of the things that I’ve done in a race bib and with skis on my feet, but I am more proud of the things I have done off the course, and I think my legacy is going to be in my advocacy. I’ve spoken about mental health and eating disorders specifically, and I’ve tried to make really hard conversations less hard for people to have, and make it possible for people to talk about things that are often stigmatized.”
What do you think it’ll feel like on the team next year when you won’t be there? What are some of the strengths other athletes have that can contribute to leadership?
“I think the team is going to be just fine without me,” Diggins said. “And I feel like that’s how I know I did my job. There’s so much leadership coming from so many people, because this team is filled with individuals who have put their heart and their energy into the team and who spend time thinking about, How can I make this team better? Not just what can I get and how can the team help me, but how can I make sure that we succeed? And I think that is why we succeed.”
When you’re talking to your European colleagues, how do you explain the U.S. as a nordic skiing nation to them?
“Our fans are not bandwagon fans,” Diggins said. “They’re in it for the ups and downs. Our fans in the U.S. are getting up at four o’clock in the morning to watch races. These are passionate people. In Minneapolis, every single person I talked to, wow. Coaches, athletes from every country, they were like, wow. Everyone cheered for everyone, it didn’t matter where you were from, we felt so loved and so welcomed. I have no doubt that that’s exactly what’s going to happen this weekend.”
What’s a message that you’d send to the kids that are going to be along the trail today?
“I would say, look how fun it is,” Diggins said. “You see people working super hard, for sure. But I would tell all the kids, look at the way that it’s fun. Similar to [Ogden and Schumacher], for me getting to ski with my parents, and the way they made it fun. It was never about the results. It was just about, How fast can you zoom down the downhill, and how fast can you go on the uphill? Do you want to try to hit a jump? And it was just super fun.”
An elementary school–aged journalist asked, what is one thing fans might not realize about being a World Cup skier?
“I would say that sometimes it’s really easy, especially when you see athletes on TV and you see them in these sort of larger than life positions, like on the podium at the Olympics, and you’re like, Oh my God,” Diggins said.
“And it’s easy to forget that we’re also just people, right? And we have our good days and our bad days and things that are challenging for us, and we have a lot of emotions. It’s easy to put athletes on this pedestal. But we’re not perfect. And I think it’s sometimes easy to forget the human side of athletics. It’s just somebody putting some skis on their feet and going out in the woods and going as hard as they can. And at the end of the day, it’s really not bigger than that.”
Racing starts tomorrow with men’s and women’s 10-kilometer interval-start classic races. Stay tuned: same bat channel, same bat time.
Here is complete audio of the press conference. Mixed zone audio from the next three days of racing is sadly off-limits for embedding on this site, much as at the Olympics, because it will make NBC cry or some such (I guess rather Infront Media in this case, though the snark stands). However, my reading of the relevant contract language is that pre-event press conference audio is kosher. Enjoy.
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