64She has seen kids pretending they were her, lunging at
the f inish line of an imaginary race to edge an opponent.
Like many U.S. Olympians, she relishes seeing Americans
start to love her sport as much as she does. She also says
winning “definitely has changed the amount that I feel
I’m able to give back, because it gives you this amazing
platform.” She is on the board of Protect Our Winters, a
Boulder, Colo.–based organization that pushes for legis-
lation to combat climate change. She is a spokesperson
for the Emily Program, which helps people treat eating
disorders like the one Diggins had as a teenager growing
up in Afton, Minn.
If she had only pursued gold, she would have all she
wanted, and she might feel empty. But she can always
keep pursuing that feeling.
When Diggins won with Randall in
2018—and joined 1976 Winter Olympics
silver medalist Bill Koch as the only
Americans to make the podium in the
sport—she did so because she was so
committed to the pain. She did not pass
Sweden’s Stina Nilsson until the final
meter of the race, on the last of the six
total laps split between the two team-
mates on the five-mile course. After
extending the tip of her ski across the
finish line, she was so exhausted that
she couldn’t process the history she had
made, by a mere 0.19 seconds.
“In the moment, to be honest, I wasn’t
even thinking about the fact that we’d
won the Olympics,” Diggins says. “It was
just this race—like any race, you know,
you just try to race as well as you can.
And I was full of the adrenaline and the
emotion and the moment of executing a
good race.”
When she lifted herself out of the snow
and turned around, she saw coaches on
their knees. Her U.S. teammates were
crying. Diggins thinks of cross-country
skiing as a team sport even when she is competing in
an individual race, and that helps her stay motivated,
too. She pursues that feeling because she is competing
for everybody else.
Diggins is 30 in a sport where elite athletes can con-
tend for a long time. She says, “I don’t feel like I’m at my
peak,” but she defines peak differently than you might
think. She doesn’t mean she will win more gold medals or
race faster. She means she can get better in small ways:
technique, tactics, consistency.
“I really have tried to reframe pressure as this amazing
privilege to be in this point of my career where I’m looking
for those tiny, tiny improvements and getting excited,”
Diggins says. “There’s always going to be something
for me to improve on. I’m never going to be bored. And
that’s so cool.”
That’s not to say her hard work hasn’t paid off—particu-
larly this season. In January 2021, Diggins captured the
most prestigious individual title of her career, becoming
the first American to win the multistage Tour de Ski. Last
March she made history again as the first U.S. woman
and just the second American to capture the overall FIS
Cross-Country Ski World Cup title. Entering her third
Olympics, she’s poised to lead a young U.S. team in Beijing.
Diggins has not yet made a final decision on how many
of the six possible events (individual sprint, team sprint,pursuit, individual start, mass start and
the relay) she will race in China, but she
is aiming to match her full slate from
PyeongChang, where she finished sev-
enth or better in all six. Once she arrives,
Diggins will evaluate her form and con-
sider the conditions—she embraces frigid
weather, but says, “if it’s super, super cold,
that’s a huge energy drain on the body”—
before solidifying her schedule. What
she does know is how she will race. She
cannot control what other skiers do or
the weather or where she finishes, but
she can control how hard she goes. She
acknowledges that after winning Olympic
gold, “the pressure is different, for sure.”
But she has a plan for dealing with that.
“I have not set outcome goals for the Olympics,” Diggins
says. “However, there are a lot of process goals. It’s this
theme of trying really hard not to get stuck on the results.”
Diggins was ready in 2018—not just for the last few
meters of that team sprint, or to win Olympic gold, but
for everything that followed. The same approach that put
her atop the podium helped her when she stepped off it.
“You don’t get a free pass for life because you won the
Olympics,” Diggins says. “You have to work every single
day to be a good person, and a good teammate. And so
in that way, it hasn’t changed my life at all.”“I really have tried to reframe pressure
as this (^) AMAZING PRIVILEGEto be in this
point of my career where I’m looking for
those tiny improvements,” Diggins says.
ERICK W. RASCO (DIGGINS); EZRA SHAW/GETTY IMAGES (GERARD)
MEET TEAM USA