THE LAST FEW seconds are brutal. They are supposed to
be. No matter how much or how hard Jessie Diggins trains,
she never expects to feel good when she pushes toward her
absolute limit at the end of a race. Sometimes she squeezes
so much out of her body that her vision tints—“everything
starts to look a little bit pink or yellow, even though I’m
not wearing colored glasses”—and sometimes her legs feel
numb. By the time she crosses the finish line, she says,
“I’m definitely, like, close to blacking out.”
That feeling explains, as much as anything, why Diggins
made history in PyeongChang with her thrilling, come-
from-behind photo finish, winning (with now retired
Kikkan Randall) the team sprint freestyle race to earn the
U.S.’s first gold medal in women’s cross-country skiing
since the Winter Games started in 1924. It explains why
she can win more medals in Beijing. It even explains why
she will be O.K. if she doesn’t medal at all.
“You just go as hard as you can,” Diggins says. “And
then you never have to ask yourself: What if I just tried?
What if I’d committed? What if I had been willing to be the
person who gives the most? I would love to be the person
who wins. But the only thing I have control over is [being]
the person who gives the most.”
She adds, “I haven’t looked at my Olympic medal in a
long time. It lives in my parents’ basement.” What she
sees, instead, are the ripple effects from winning.BY MICHAEL ROSENBERG