With the planet having just endured the hottest twelve months in human history, it's no surprise that winter has been a dismal affair across North America this year, especially in the Midwest. As of mid-February, average temperatures in most border states were ten degrees or more above average, and ice cover on the Great Lakes was at an all-time low. Like Washington Position The Cumulative Winter Severity Index showed cities from International Falls to Toledo experiencing record mild winters, he explained. If the eruption of a giant Indonesian volcano in 1816 created a “year without a summer,” then the endless raging fire of coal, natural gas, and oil is now beginning to create years when winter is a memory.
Minneapolis — where winter temperatures are typically among the coldest for any major metropolitan area in the Lower48, about the same as Anchorage — may have felt the fever more acutely than anywhere in the country. The Twin Cities had a record twenty-three consecutive days in which the temperature was above freezing. The final weekend of the USA Lake Hockey Championships was canceled due to insufficient ice. and the Ice Palace of Minnesota closed for the season on January 27. The city prides itself on being enclosed for the winters. It maintains a huge series of skyscrapers that connect sixty-nine city blocks in the center of the city so that people don't have to go outdoors in the bitter cold. But this winter, those suspended walkways looked as hauntingly derelict as the boat ramps at Colorado's drought-drained reservoirs. By mid-February, Nashville had seen more snow than Minneapolis.
And then, in the twenty-four hours around Valentine's Day, two things hit town. One was Nordic skiing superstar and Minnesota native Jesse Diggins, joined by the rest of the international cross-country elite for the first World Cup ski race on American snow in nearly a quarter of a century. Diggins has worked throughout her career to convince the European hosts of the World Cup to stop America. it would come within days of the hit in March 2020 when the outbreak broke out COVID close the matches. This was the second chance—likely the last chance to race at home in her storied career—and so she and everyone else had sweated out the high temperatures, bracing themselves for the somewhat dreary scene of a ribbon of artificial snow. through a muddy park. But then, by some almost cinematic magic, Diggins was whisked home to a cold front that came with Minneapolis' first real snow of the winter, six inches of fluffy white powder covering the ground with forty-eight hours to spare.
Diggins is the best winter endurance performer the United States has ever produced, and more than any runner I've seen, she wears her heart on her sleeve — and her cheekbones, a trademark that has spread to her teammates. There was a glitter booth at Wirth Park, the golf course just minutes from downtown Minneapolis where the games were held this weekend, and thousands of young spectators had their own sparkle. That brilliance epitomizes the sheer joy with which Diggins seems to compete, in a sport long dominated by the usually more reserved Scandinavians and Russians. And that joy, in turn, seems to have helped build the camaraderie that has turned the U.S. into an unlikely skiing powerhouse, this year more than ever, with a slew of Americans landing on podiums across northern and central Europe. The unlikely part is largely due to the difficulty of having to compete in Europe all winter—in a normal year, American skiers have to pack their bags in November to go to Finland and won't return home until late Of March . They are perhaps the only athletes in the world who never take a home match. Diggins noted that this was the first time she had seen her husband since the games began in the fall.
And although Diggins' long career has earned her every possible honor – world championship gold and medals of all three colors at the Olympics – this year looked like it could be very different. Having struggled with an eating disorder early in her career, she announced her comeback to her more than two hundred thousand Instagram followers this fall. “Sometimes, getting everything you wanted comes with unexpected pressures,” she told a pre-season press conference where she spoke with characteristic frankness about her bulimia. “Maybe a World Cup at home will come with extra pressure and expectations. I have struggled with this as well. I wouldn't want to let people down or let them down.”
But he figured out how to deal with the problem by gathering the support he needed. And then she managed, at the age of thirty-two, to raise her game to a new level. He won the Tour de Ski — the seven-race-in-nine-day contest that is the sport's premier annual event — and has opened up a wide, almost certainly insurmountable lead for the crystal ball that goes to the season's points champion, which meant he came into Minneapolis wearing the yellow bib belonging to the world leader. When he came out to warm up an hour before the race started, there were already thousands of Minnesotans lining the course, and as he reached the steep hill where most were waiting, there was a wave of cheering. You could see it hit her almost like a physical force. it slowed and, even from a distance, looked like it was tearing up. “I cried about seven more times today,” he later said, “all for the best reasons.” All day long, as the heats of the day's sprint races progressed, you could follow her progress down the course simply by hearing the fanfare the sight of her caused. As it happened, he finished fourth – a group of young Swedes have been setting the pace in these shorter races all season and last week was no different. But the absence from the podium did not dampen the public's affection, nor her mood. “That was the coolest day of my racing career,” he said (and this is someone who denied rivals on the line for America's first Olympic Nordic gold, as NBC commentator Chad Salmela shouted, “Here comes Diggins! “). “I could retire happy right now,” she added, before quickly saying she doesn't plan to.
The rest of the field seemed almost as impressed by the crowd, which according to skiers seemed bigger and more attentive than any European stop apart from Oslo's famous and venerable Holmenkollen. Federico Pellegrino, an elderly Italian great, said he too almost cried just because so many people knew his name and cheered him on. And Norway's Johannes Klaebo, the greatest male Nordic skier of all time, after predictably winning the men's race, took a microphone to tell the packed grandstand: “We have to come back here, that's for sure,” which was the right. to say — wilder cheers ensued.
Nordic skiing is an unusual sport in that competitors will sprint one day and then run much longer distances the next. Sunday was a ten-kilometer affair (many of the same skiers will be doing a 50k race in a few weeks, in Norway), with a split start, so skiers started thirty seconds apart and were timed when they crossed the line after three long loops through the park. The men were first, perhaps because the organizers might have thought it would be a relatively routine race: the Norwegian men are at least as strong as the Swedish women, and many of the distance races this year have ended with three of them on the podium; Meanwhile, the last American to win a distance race was the legendary Bill Koch, in 1983. But there were signs that the men's team was starting to break out. Two of them—Alaska's JC Schoonmaker and Vermonter's Ben Ogden—had finished on the podium during the year. But it was another youngster from Alaska, Gus Schumacher, who looked to be having a career day as the race progressed. The loudspeaker announced he was first and cheers rang out as he skied off, but with most of the European superstars starting behind him, everyone expected it to be temporary—including Schumacher. He later said: “I heard I got into the captain's chair.” (The race leader occupies a throne, watched by TV cameras, until he's displaced by a faster skier.) “And I was like, 'Sweet! I have to deal with this thing!' ” before the next finisher turned in a better time.
But one skier after another came in a few seconds slower, and Schumacher later said he began to think he might end up in the Top Ten and then that he might end up on the podium. A former junior world champion, he had been wandering in the skiing wilderness for a few years – at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, he had come nine minutes behind the leader in a race. But he had several Top Twenty finishes this year and it was clear that Sunday would be much better. As his teammates saw other finishers coming in slower, they began to rally around him, daring to hope, but I'm not sure anyone thought he would win until the royal Klaebo broke through, moving fast but still six seconds slower than O Schumacher over ten kilometers. The wait for the last Norwegians to cross the line was excruciating, but then it was over and Diggins and several of the other women lifted Schumacher on their shoulders at the finish as the crowd chanted his name.