Jessie Diggins seals extraordinary fourth World Cup overall title before retirement on home snow | Jessie Diggins
No woman outside of Europe had ever won the overall cross-country skiing World Cup title before Jessie Diggins in 2021. She has now won it four times.
The Minnesota-born star clinched another crystal globe in the twilight of her glittering career Friday, securing the season’s crown with a fifth-place finish in the 10K classic at the World Cup final in Lake Placid, New York. Diggins made it a mathematical certainty with two races remaining on the season-ending weekend, giving him a third consecutive overall title and fourth overall.
Diggins entered the final with a 342-point lead over Sweden’s Moa Ilar. With a maximum of 345 points available across the three races, Ilar needed to sweep the weekend schedule and have Diggins finish at the back of the pack to have a chance of overtaking her. Instead, Diggins’ result Friday eliminated any remaining doubt.
She finished in 29:36.9 in snowy conditions in the Adirondacks. Ilar, who had started earlier in the interval race, found himself eighth. Sweden’s Linn Svahn won in 29:4.4, followed by Frida Karlsson and Norway’s Heidi Weng third.
The result also secured the distance title for Diggins.
Diggins becomes the first woman to win three consecutive World Cup titles – cross-country skiing’s greatest prize – since Poland’s Justyna Kowalczyk from 2009 to 2011. Only Russia’s Yelena Välbe, with five titles, has won more. She is one of two North American skiers, male or female, to win an overall title with fellow American Bill Koch in 1982.
The 34-year-old from the small suburb of Afton in St Paul (population 2,951) announced before the season that she would retire at the end of the season. She will compete in the final two events of the weekend – a sprint on Saturday and a distance race on Sunday – before finishing her career on local snow.
In 15 seasons on the World Cup circuit, Diggins has 33 individual victories and 90 podium finishes, both among the top 10 in the sport’s history and the most for a non-European skier.
She took control of this season’s standings during the opening weekend in Ruka, Finland, and has not relinquished the lead. She won three races, stood on the podium seven more times and won the Tour de Ski, the seven-stage, nine-day race series modeled on the Tour de France.
Diggins will retire as the most decorated American cross-country skier with four Olympic medals. She won gold in the team sprint at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics with Kikkan Randall – the first Olympic cross-country gold for the United States – and added silver and bronze in 2022. At the 2026 Milan Cortina Games, she won bronze in the 10 km freestyle despite a rib injury.
“It’s time to start the next chapter of my life,” Diggins said earlier this season. “I’ve been working very, very hard for a very long time… but it’s time for the next chapter.”
Diggins said the decision to retire grew over time, citing the physical demands of the sport and the cost of spending much of each year traveling on the World Cup circuit.
“It wasn’t a magical moment. Over time, all these other things in my life that are important to me started to overvalue ski racing,” she said. “The time has come for me to be really excited about having a normal life. »
His legacy also includes advocacy for the mental health of athletes, shaped in part by his open-mindedness about recovering from an eating disorder.
“One of the pieces of legacy I leave behind is how US Ski & Snowboard deals with mental health and how they support people,” she said. “When someone says, ‘Hey, I have an eating disorder,’ there’s so much help available, because I’ve been so open and shared everything along the way.”
Diggins is expected to end his career at the end of Sunday’s race in Lake Placid.
