Diggins on her next chapter: 'I want to make people love this sport'

Jessie Diggins ended her career on home snow in Lake Placid, USA, claiming her third consecutive Overall Crystal Globe. Her 2025/26 Coop FIS Cross-Country World Cup season had been a lap of honour around the world, during which she also won an Olympic Games bronze medal and a third Tour de Ski title.

Having made her World Cup debut in 2011, what was the first thing the 34-year-old Cross-Country icon did after hanging up her skis one final time?

"I was really excited to go camping,” Diggins said.

”That’s something that I didn't get to do as much of because it was just so focused on training. I was excited to have the freedom to say yes to all of these things that in the past I had to say, 'No, not right now.’"

A few months later, the 2018 Olympic Team Sprint champion is still settling into her new life, off the Cross-Country course.

"I don't know that it's sunk in quite yet,” Diggins said.

”I imagine it will really sink in in November. That's when I’d usually pack my bags to be gone for four months, going to Europe and being away until March, missing Thanksgiving, Christmas and all these family holidays that I’ve never been around for.

"I think it will sink in and it will probably feel hard because I imagine I will miss the racing. But it will also be so exciting. The idea of actually getting to have a Christmas. Because it's always right before the Tour de Ski. I haven't had a real Christmas since I was 18."

A lot has changed already though.

"I have a lot more diversity in my life now. And it's been just so awesome. I'm still getting to do all these things that are so important to me,” Diggins said.

"I’ve been doing a lot with (climate advocacy organization) Protect Our Winters, getting to travel a lot for really cool things, doing a lot with mental health, still getting to do these things that are really important to me, but also getting to be home and to garden and to go camping with my husband. It's a different life, and it's something that I have been looking forward to for a very long time.”

After spending most of her year on the road for more than a decade, Diggins enjoys to spend more time at home in the garden, where her lemon tree can get some extra care.

"This is actually hilarious. Three years ago, I took a lemon that I was using to make a salad dressing and thought, 'You know what, I'm just going to see what happens,' so I planted the seeds. Now this tree is as tall as me, which is crazy,” Diggins said.

In a decade and a half among the best skiers in the world, Diggins made her mark on the sport. In the 2020/21 season, she became the first woman from the USA to win the Overall Crystal Globe, and the first USA skier since Bill Koch in 1982. She then went on to do it three more times. 

At the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games Team Sprint Free, she came into the final home straight in second place, right behind Swedish superstar Stina Nilsson, who had won the Sprint Classic title earlier in the championship. In the last strides of the race, Diggins pushed past Nilsson, earning the USA's first Olympic Cross-Country skiing gold medal alongside her idol Kikkan Randall, by a margin of 0.19 seconds.

It was the first Olympic Cross-Country medal won by USA women and the USA's first Olympic Cross-Country medal since Koch's silver in 1976.

With a silver and a bronze at Beijing 2022, followed by another bronze at Milano Cortina 2026, Diggins won a total of four Olympic medals, making her the most decorated USA Cross-Country skier in Olympic history.

In 2021, she also became the first from her country to win the Tour de Ski – a title she claimed three times in her career, the last one this winter. 

She claimed three individual World Championship medals, and seven in total, including two golds: In the Val di Fiemme (ITA) 2013 Team Sprint and the Planica (SLO) 2023 10km Interval Start Free.

The superstar from Saint Paul, Minnesota, walked away at the top of the sport, having won three consecutive Overall Crystal Globes, the Distance Crystal Globe, the Tour de Ski and an Olympic bronze medal in her final season. By her own admission, she could still have achieved great results had she chosen to continue.

But according to Diggins, Cross-Country was never just about the medals.

"It wasn't always about trying to win or beat anyone else. It was, 'I want to get the most out of me’,” she said.

"I want to see how tough can I be. If I think there's a little bit of energy in there, I'm going to dig deep to get it and put it all out there. There is so much about racing that you can't control, but you do control your own effort and the heart that you put into it.

And Diggins has not stopped exhausting herself just yet.

"I still love to train. I still love to challenge myself. So I'm signed up for some trail running races, and I'm just excited to get to go do those,” she said.

"It's trail running and growing lemon trees and trying to save the planet.”

Asked what she is most proud of from her career, Diggins said the "advocacy piece" came easily to mind.

"I was able to take success on snow and make it mean something to me and hopefully mean something to other people,” she said.

"So many people shared with me that 'you helped me through my eating disorder,' 'I struggled with depression and you helped me feel less alone,' or 'I learned how to be a better coach from you'.

She is also proud of who she has been in the team.

"I would literally stay awake at night thinking about ways to cheer somebody up if they were having a really tough time or were homesick,” Diggins said.

"I feel like I put a lot of my heart into the team and I really enjoyed the last five or six years of being more of a team-mom type role. It was so rewarding.”

Constantly breaking new barriers for USA Cross-Country, it has also been rewarding to see how the sport has grown in popularity back home since the start of her career.

"Between 2018 and 2022, the Minnesota Youth Ski League doubled. They literally got twice the number of kids and families out there loving winter and learning how to ski,” Diggins said.

"This sport is growing, the resources for the team are growing.”

International Cross-Country has also seen plenty of change during Diggins' career. One of the most significant came when men and women began competing over the same distances from the 2022/23 World Cup season.

"Having equal distance was a big thing for me. Now we have equal prize money, equal numbers of races. We race in the same place and have the same fans,” Diggins said.

"I shouldn't feel lucky. That should just be something that is true, but it’s really cool, and it’s really cool to see how the sport is growing in the U.S.

When reflecting on a career packed with victories and iconic moments, Diggins points to the two World Cup weekends on home snow as her most memorable experiences.

In February 2024, the World Cup returned to the USA for the first time in more than two decades, with competitions on Diggins’ home snow in Minneapolis.

"One of the coolest moments of my life was in Minneapolis when I finally got to race in my own country. Everything was just so beautiful," she said.

"I think there were over 20,000 people out there. The crowd was going crazy, I was just smiling and crying the whole time, and it wasn't even the race. It was the warm-up lap.

The World Cup circuit returned to the USA and Lake Placid for the last stage of the 2025/26 season as Diggins made her last appearances as a professional skier in front of a home crowd.

”In Lake Placid, when I skied my final lap of the stadium with all the kids, I was smiling and crying at the same time. There were like 700 kids out there and that's really what it's all about,” Diggins said.

"The fact that that's how I got to end my career is so totally fitting. That's an experience that I'm never going to forget.

Diggins said she leaves the sport without regrets.

"You learn and grow through mistakes and through failures and through not winning. When you don't win, that's when you become a stronger and more resilient person,” she said.

"Even with my eating disorder, I think I am a more compassionate person and I understand and relate more to other people because of that. It made me potentially a better human because I had to work so hard to heal.

And she will not disappear completely from Cross-Country skiing.

"It would be really cool to help coach little kids, just to make it fun,” Diggins said.

”I just want you to love this sport. You don't have to race. You don't have to care about results. I just want you to be able to move outside in the winter.”

Having seen her USA teammates – men and women – progress over the past years, she promises that her role as a mentor, role model and teammate is not over just because she has hung her skis up.

"I want to be on speed dial for my teammates for anything that they need,” Diggins said.

"I want to be their biggest cheerleader and I hope that I can provide mentorship in whatever capacity they want.

Now she is looking forward to continuing her work as a public speaker.

"I was excited about getting into speaking and trying to make potentially even more of a difference. I want to try to touch so many people's hearts and try to inspire so many people and do more with climate and mental health,” Diggins said.

"I pay the bills by telling my story and by trying to inspire people and by speaking. That's something that you can do if you are sick, if you are hurt, if you're traveling a lot, if you have a life. It's very different.

Ensuring the Cross-Country world does not end either, she wants to raise awareness of the climate change that poses a threat to white winters for future generations. 

"The mission with Protect Our Winters is clean air, clean water and a healthy planet. We all need that. The next generations deserve our very best,” she said.

"I want to make sure that all those kids that were there with me in Lake Placid have snow to ski on and have a future in the sport. That's absolutely worth fighting for."

Click here to see full results from the 2025/2026 season, here for the Women's Overall World Cup Standings and here to follow FIS Cross-Country on Youtube.