Fighting the pain of bruised ribs, Jessie Diggins skied to a bronze medal Thursday in the women’s 10-kilometer freestyle cross-country race at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympic Games. Diggins, who crashed in the skiathlon on Saturday, the opening day of the games, finished 49.7 seconds behind Sweden’s Frida Karlsson, who won her second gold medal in these Olympics. Karlsson’s teammate Ebba Andersson clinched silver by 3.1 seconds.
Just after she lunged across the finish line, Diggins dropped to the ground, clutching her ribs in pain. She had been favored to win this race before her crash.
“This is what it takes to beat Jessie Diggins in a 1o-kilometer freestyle,” an NBC commentator noted: “a bruised rib and maybe a tough start to the games and peak performance by everybody else.”
Diggins, the best cross-country skier in American history and current World Cup leader, finished the 10K in 23 minutes and 38.9 seconds. She plans to retire after this season. The 34-year-old Minnesota native trains with SMS T2 team, the professional cross-country ski team at Stratton Mountain that includes three other Milan Cortina Olympic skiers: Americans Julia Kern and Ben Ogden — who won a silver medal in the men’s sprint classic on Tuesday — and Canadian Rémi Drolet.
Diggins crashed in the first of six laps in Saturday’s skiathlon, an event in which racers ski three laps in classic style and three in skate style. Several racers fell due to slushy conditions. Diggins finished eighth in that race. She finished 17th in the women’s classic sprint on Tuesday.
In the 10-kilometer freestyle on Thursday, 111 competitors, starting at 30-second intervals, skied three loops that got progressively more difficult. When Diggins hit the 8.6-kilometer mark, one commentator observed, “This is the time in a race when things get so tough your body is just fighting you, and you are trying to will yourself literally every step to keep the pressure on, but that’s what Jessie Diggins has been able to do. When the wheels are coming off, she keeps herself in the race.”
This is Diggins’ fourth Olympic medal. She won gold in the team sprint in 2018, silver in the 30-kilometer freestyle in 2022 and bronze in the freestyle sprint, also in 2022. She is expected to race in the four-person relay on Saturday and the women’s team sprint on Wednesday.