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By Pasha Kahn
For readers feeling lost without weekend World Cup races to watch this spring, there are two feature-length films on Crystal Globe winners Jessie Diggins and Johannes Høsflot Klæbo available to stream. Diggins’s Threshold (available on Peacock) was made by the Brinkema brothers and produced by actor Patrick Dempsey, and follows her through the 2023/2024 season as she struggles with an eating disorder relapse.
Klæbo (available to rent on Prime or AppleTV; mostly in Norwegian, with English subtitles) follows him during the 2024/2025 season into the Trondheim World Championships and is written and directed by Stian Engh and Ola Høsflot Klæbo. Both are worthwhile watches, and since spoilers follow (if such a thing can exist in this context), you may wish to view the films first and return here later.
Threshold is, by some distance, the best cross-country skiing film ever made. It is also not a light watch. For fans accustomed to the happy-go-lucky Diggins that is her mainstream public image, this portrait of her may come as a jolt — for much of the film she is fending off a deep, visible, psychological pain. Fascinating, heartbreaking, and undeniably brave, Diggins takes viewers behind the curtain during a difficult season.
In the opening shot Diggins tells us the root of the problem:
“From a young age I’ve had this relentless desire to be perfect. This voice would say, ‘You’re not doing enough. You have to be willing to suffer like nobody else.’ And even when I knew that this is going to kill me, I kept going.”
We learn about the origins of her summer relapse — her teenage struggle with bulimia and a jam-packed post–gold medal life and how six years of frenetic pace took their toll. “I’ve gotten so good at being in pain while I’m skiing,” Diggins says, “but in my life I was starting to get really good at quietly being a little bit in pain all the time.”
Diggins is ambivalent about heading to Europe to start the World Cup season after her relapse. “I started thinking to myself,” Diggins says, “you could make yourself look as sick as you feel in your soul right now and no one will ask you for anything, and you can just rest.” U.S. Ski Team Coach Matt Whitcomb tells her she doesn’t have to go. It’s not the last time they’ll have this type of conversation.
Relieved to have received permission to stop, she decides to go anyway. Whitcomb recalls that she told him, “‘I feel like I use sport and competition to stay on track.’” He responds, “If that’s the truth, then let’s go.” We see the coaches’ quandary throughout the season: The team environment is part of her solution, and at the same time the pressure and expectations are part of the problem.
[Read more: Jessie Diggins on the 2023/2024 Season: Taking Care of Her Mental Health, and Taking Things Day by Day (from November 2023)]
Klæbo also explains the premise in the opening shot: “I am willing to sacrifice anything to win those ski races at the World Championship in Trondheim,” he intones. “The 50km for me is the most important event and it is where I’m going to have my best day.”
To get there, he will have to train body and mind. As Petter Northug tells us: “Explaining … how many hours of mental preparation it takes to do the job that Johannes does is impossible because it’s so extreme. It’s day in day out for many months and years to have the calmness when the starting gun goes off.”
This sets up the salivating prospect of watching the world’s best skier prepare his mind to take on the quest for an elusive 50km World Championship title on his home trails. Klæbo has singled out the race as his personal white whale, a race that will define not just his season, but his whole career.
The film starts with Klæbo’s father surprising him with a birthday cake while at a fall training camp in Livigno. Klæbo grumbles that he doesn’t “have time for a birthday now.” His father tells him that he’s getting weird and Klæbo explains, “I think it’s a bit tiring.” And so it goes. Klæbo systematically strips away anything deemed tiring: birthdays, Christmas, visits to his nephews, training with other people, cooking, moving his own luggage, and perhaps most of all — emotions.
Klæbo’s emotional stasis is the principal weakness of the film. It’s hard to connect to the stakes or the pressure when so little of what he’s thinking or feeling bubbles to the surface. Perhaps that is why Klæbo’s father Håkon often narrates Klæbo’s emotions: “He’s scared now, he’s terrified, he wants it so much….”
We never really see it. At times it appears that Håkon feels things so Klæbo doesn’t have to. Klæbo is always Klæbo, and emotions — whether positive or negative — are equally draining and must be avoided. He’s a zen monk with a substantial gaming habit.
For a film on the inner life of Jessie Diggins, Threshold manages to fit in a lot of ski action, especially during Period 1 of the World Cup in November and December 2023. To Diggins’s surprise she quickly takes command of the yellow bib. Ironically, given her state of mind, the yellow bib is an unwanted burden. “It creates so much stress and pressure,” Diggins tells us, “It comes with so many eyes. And so many interviews and so many cameras. And I feel so incredibly watched all the time.”
We feel her exposure in small arctic towns as Diggins forces herself to perform cheerfully in back-to-back interviews with the European press. A Swedish reporter asks if she’s having fun in the yellow bib. She answers positively, but looks like she’s about to hurl.
There are many instances in the film where fans may experience whiplash as Diggins shows the inverse of her public self — a surprise after a career of unwaveringly upbeat interviews. Yet, her relentless positivity never came across as fake; instead it seemed like a mixture of the genuine and the aspirational, and, as the film makes clear, a deliberate attempt to replace a destructive inner voice with a positive verbal one.
Likewise, Diggins’s positivity never grew stale for much of her fanbase. That she wasn’t always having “fun” wasn’t the point; instead, remaining grateful and sunny was an intentional choice rooted in a personal process. Intuitively, people connected with that.
Where Klæbo, the movie, excels, is as a case study of the Klæbo family — particularly three generations of its menfolk. Ola shares his gaze as the watchful younger brother, Klæbo does the skiing, 82-year-old grandfather Kåre Høsflot handles the training and the wax, and dad Håkon does everything else.
There are women included, too: Klæbo’s mother, grandmother, sister, fiancée Pernille Døsvik, and American physiotherapist Megan Stowe all make appearances, but the relationship between the three male family members is the heart of the film. Of all, father Håkon steals the show with his humor, selflessness, and emotional availability.
With every extraneous aspect of life taken care of by family, Klæbo is left to do little more than ski and rest, and we see him supine as often as training. He lives in a familial cocoon laced with luxury. There’s the private jet back home to Norway when he gets sick, and Christmas with Pernille in an executive suite at a famous five-star Swiss hotel. The niceties are beyond the reach of most World Cup athletes and further set the mood of Klæbo inhabiting an ethereal playland.
This vision of the Klæbo family is both heartwarming and claustrophobic, the logic of a ski family taken to its absolute extreme. The family’s dedication to Johannes’s success also comes with burdens, particularly for Klæbo’s younger siblings Ola and Ane who live in his shadow. This isn’t lost on Klæbo, who tells us, “The thought that I’ve been selfish hasn’t crossed my mind a few times, it crosses my mind constantly, and it’s probably…if there’s one thing that I am, it’s 100 percent selfish. I’ll apologize to everyone when the World Champs are over.”
In Threshold we see Diggins doing athletically well and personally poorly. While in Trondheim, Diggins receives a body composition scan. The results, Diggins’s longtime coach Jason Cork, tells us, were “shocking.” Diggins’s entire career could be prematurely unplugged.
Professional help arrives, along with her family, and Diggins is cleared to start the 2024 Tour de Ski. Dr. Jennifer Gaudiani tells us that the initial recovery period, which will last most of the remaining season, is incredibly difficult. Changes in metabolism and stomach pains are common. “It’s also really psychologically difficult,” Dr. Guadiani says, “because the eating disorder voice can get louder in those first eight weeks in ways that are excruciating.”
Despite this, Diggins wins the Tour de Ski, though we never learn that from this movie. Fittingly, race results aren’t always in focus because they’re not the true story here. Still, the accomplishment is all the more remarkable given her struggles at the time.
“I just feel like I have to fight every single day to keep this going,” Diggins tells us in her hotel room. “My stomach hurts all the time, and I’m not sleeping, I’m hot all the time, like my body’s just going…it’s a lot.”
Looming ahead of her is the Minneapolis World Cup, which promises intense pressure and media attention. There’s also the yellow bib to hold onto, and after a couple of difficult days in Canmore her lead starts to slip. She is crushed when Swedish pundits express doubt regarding her fitness. She tells us, “The voice in my head loves that sort of thing. All I could hear was, ‘It’s you, you’re too slow, you didn’t do enough.’ And you can completely tank everything you just worked for.”
[Read more: Jessie Diggins Opens Up About Cameras and Pressure Ahead of Wirth World Cup Weekend (from February 2024)]
The real drama of Klæbo happens when he gets a sore throat at an altitude camp and a test reveals he has a coronavirus (though not Covid-19). He and his father quickly fly home, the World Champs now in question. This is Klæbo at his most stressed, and though he recovers (obviously) he is still stricken by what appears to be a psychosomatic return of symptoms on the verge of the championships. Getting sick is Klæbo’s biggest fear, and his family conclude that he is thinking himself sick.
This is a moment that calls for a Rocky-style montage (check) and a whole lot of self-belief. Instead, Klæbo turns to his secret weapon — acupuncture. Klæbo’s preparations are as follows: he skis, he sleeps, he uses massage to “crack open the tensions in his body.” Downtime is spent gaming, his brain switched to reflexive buffering. Pre-race jitters are fended off with an obsessive series of routines. He isolates at his cabin — airborne pathogens are, after all, his only kryptonite. And, not least, he suspends himself in a near-childlike state while his family handles his care.
The viewer may have a hard time relating to all of this, and may be left still wanting a tolerable explanation of his greatness. If Klæbo has a superpower, it’s his infinite willingness to be bored. There’s a stale sameness to his days, a level of repetition in all aspects that would drive anyone with a shred of desire for novelty insane. Klæbo, on the other hand, is bored but doesn’t care. He can hold a singular goal in his mind and ignore all else.
Ola has called this film a “truly honest story.” There’s no reason to doubt that this is his honest opinion, but to the viewer it seems like something must be missing from Johannes Klæbo’s quest for the Northugian “calmness” necessary to win the big race. Among the Klæbo kin there is no talk of sports psychology. Klæbo never seems to doubt himself, nor do we have any sense of his inner voice.
To this reviewer’s knowledge, Klæbo has never alluded to his inner monologue. Some studies indicate that 30 to 50 percent of people don’t have one — and, though this drifts away from the task of a film review, those who lack an internal narrator often fill their mind instead with an encompassing spatial awareness. If true, this speculation could help explain Klæbo’s preternatural positioning in races. Perhaps that is what he does while skiing alone all the time — visualizing courses and snow textures and the individual movements of, say, a Ben Ogden. We may never know.
Regarding Klæbo the person, the film raises as many questions as it answers. In an evocative scene, Klæbo describes his reaction to being disqualified from the 50km win at the 2021 World Champs in Oberstdorf following controversial positioning in the finishing stretch alongside Alexander Bolshunov and Emil Iversen: “Everything went black.” Back in team quarters, he recounts smashing ten to fifteen water glasses against the wall, along with a kettle. The anti-doping controller with him called the police. And that’s all we hear about that.
In Threshold, Diggins worries about letting everyone down in Canmore, that perhaps she doesn’t have a higher gear because she isn’t eating enough. Whitcomb asks her, “Do [the doctors] have strategies for fueling when you don’t feel like eating?” Diggins responds, “My eating disorder makes me feel like there isn’t room to be grateful or loved, so if I try to bring these things back, then the opposite is true, there isn’t as much room for my eating disorder voice. If I’m with other people and feel really connected, that voice doesn’t have as much space.”
Whitcomb had asked a sport science question, but Diggins’s solution is far more fundamental. This moment helps the film avoid the cliché of an athlete finding a way to triumph over adversity, by turning the standard narrative on its head. Diggins triumphs in part because of a destructive inner voice, and the obstacle to be overcome is in part her success. Winning isn’t always winning.
Along the courses of the World Cups in Minneapolis and Lake Placid were many spectators, some with little knowledge of the sport, there to see Diggins. The draw wasn’t to see if she’d win, but an attraction to her human qualities. There was the beguiling feeling that Diggins could use the spectators’ kinetic support to suffer a little more, that she skied on an emotional current mainframed into the crowd. Most of all, there was the magical sense that when Diggins skied anything might happen.
After watching both Klæbo and Threshold, it’s hard to reconcile the differences between the two Crystal Globe winners. Klæbo is technically and tactically perfect from start to finish. He embodies the perfection that Diggins’s disordered inner voice demands of her. Driven to be perfect, she instead turned out gritty performances filled with emotion that fans can grasp and be moved by. Klæbo is perfect, but does not seem to derive much joy from winning, nor does perfection or winning seem to motivate him, at least not on a subconscious level. Instead, his actual goal is not to lose. Klæbo reserves his deep emotions for losses [see this treatment of his unheard-of exit in the Davos quarterfinals last December], and the viewer could be forgiven for hoping to see him falter — these have been among his most compelling moments.
As for Threshold, Diggins could likely have asked Patrick Dempsey to produce a polished highlight reel packed with product placements as an ode to her career. Instead, she gives us her grittiest performance yet, by showing her guarded, vulnerable self in the hope that it may help others who similarly suffer. Threshold is a great testament to an athlete who strove to always put her team first in an individual sport, to rewrite the expectations, and to always be proud of her work. Threshold’s excellence, both beautiful and troubling, promises a shelf life beyond Diggins’s current fame.
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