Jessie Diggins, Team USA’s most successful cross-country skier, says she will retire after this season

Jessie Diggins has inspired a generation of cross-country skiers. She has advocated for mental health and climate change legislation. But mostly she has won ski races — more of them than any other American cross-country skier.

Diggins will ski professionally for just one more season, she announced Wednesday. Then she’ll bring to a close a career that gave her sport iconic moments and made the Afton native and Stillwater High School graduate recognizable far beyond Minnesota.

“She’s the George Washington on the Mount Rushmore of skiing in the United States,” said Chad Salmela, a cross-country skiing commentator for NBC.

Diggins, 34, is the most decorated American cross-country skier in history with three Olympic medals, three overall World Cup titles and seven world championship medals in her career.

Entering her final season, which begins Nov. 28 in Finland, Diggins has 29 wins at World Cup events, among the 79 times she’s stood on a podium. The 2026 Winter Olympics in northern Italy from Feb. 6-22 would be Diggins’ fourth Games. Her last races are expected to be at the World Cup finals March 20-22 in Lake Placid, N.Y.

“It’s going to be hard to step away from this sport and team that I love so much, but it also feels right in my heart, and I’m so excited to open a new chapter in my life!” she wrote in her social media post. “Skiing has given me more joy, challenge, courage and community than I could have ever imagined.”

Diggins vaulted into worldwide stardom at the Pyeongchang Olympics in 2018, when she partnered with Kikkan Randall and blazed ahead of Sweden’s Stina Nilsson on the final stretch of the women’s team sprint freestyle. Diggins’ push — and her resulting gold medal, the first for the U.S. in cross-country skiing — has become the iconic moment in the sport, said Salmela, the NBC announcer who provided the soundtrack with screams of “Here comes Diggins! Here comes Diggins!”

American cross-country skiers hadn’t won an Olympic medal since 1976. And for four decades, the sport had been waiting for a Jessie Diggins, Salmela said. He didn’t think it would be her, though, calling her technique a bit “raw” and her races not quite “beautiful.”

Still, Diggins would just win. “She put more into the heart of her performances,” Salmela said.

By 2021, Salmela said, Diggins’ technique started to catch up to heart, and the victories came in droves. She won the overall World Cup championship in 2021, becoming the first American woman to do so. She won another in 2023-24 and again last season. At 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Diggins brought home a silver medal in the 30-kilometer freestyle and a bronze in the individual sprint. She’s also the first American to win the multi-event Tour de Ski, doing so twice, in 2021 and 2024.

Sophie Goldschmidt, the president and chief executive of U.S. Ski & Snowboard, congratulated Diggins on “a historic career” and called her “a remarkable role model.”

“As an organization, we are thankful for the culture she has helped build on the Stifel U.S. Cross-Country Ski Team alongside the excellent coaching staff and athletes, and the impact she has had on the world of ski racing,” Goldschmidt said.

“This whole weekend has been my career dream come true,” Diggins said of the first World Cup event held in the U.S. since 2001. “It barely feels real. Everyone came ready to celebrate skiing in this country. This is something I’ve been working toward for a very long time. I’ve never been more proud, maybe of anything.”

Diggins was 4 when she started skiing with the Minnesota Youth Ski League (MYSL), a nonprofit of volunteer-run clubs for children.

When Diggins won Olympic gold in 2018, MYSL got a lift, too. About 1,000 kids among 10 new clubs enrolled, said Amy Cichanowski, MYSL’s longtime executive director. When the World Cup arrived on Minnesota ground in 2024, thousands of young skiers were in the crowd of 20,000.

“It made everything we were working for make a little more sense,” Cichanowski said. “Obviously, a majority of our kids aren’t going to become World Cup champions, but it is important for them to see that path.”

Cichanowski, who plans to travel to Lake Placid for Diggins’ final races, anticipates that the superstar won’t fade from view despite leaving the international circuit.

Diggins turned her 2018 stardom into a platform of advocacy, including lobbying for legislation to curb climate change. She became outspoken about her struggles with eating disorders, forming an ongoing partnership with the Emily Program, which provides treatment for them.

“I can’t really remember another celebrity or athlete bringing the sparkle, and the joy, and the hope that Jessie does when she talks about her story,” said Jillian Lampert, the organization’s vice president of strategy and public affairs.

Lampert said the Emily Program sometimes points hesitant clients toward podcasts with Diggins, hoping that her story might persuade them to seek treatment. Recently, the Minnesota-based organization sent one 16-year-old home with Diggins’ blogs and podcasts, Lampert said. The 16-year-old called back the next day, ready to start.

“People think when they have an eating disorder that they are alone, that nobody will understand what they’re going through. Nobody will understand what it feels like,” Lampert said. “[Diggins] was able to say, ‘Let’s talk about it.’ ”

Diggins relapsed in her eating disorder during the summer of 2023, and Lampert remembers getting a call from her, unsure if the organization would want her to continue as a spokesperson.

Diggins shared her struggles widely in social media posts and interviews, saying she believed talking about her situation could help break down the stigma around eating disorders.

In her statement Wednesday, Diggins said she was proud of the advocacy work her career had allowed her to do, “especially in the mental health, snow access and climate spaces.”

Sydney Peterson, a U.S. Paralympian from Lake Elmo who also competed in cross-country skiing at Stillwater, said the way Diggins “gave back to the community and seemed to have a holistic approach to the sport and just wanted to uplift the younger generation was inspiring and motivational.”

Randall, now 42 and retired herself, said: “Jessie has shown you can be serious, focused, determined … and always keeps the perspective of doing it because she loves it.”

When Diggins was named the Minnesota Star Tribune Sportsperson of the Year in 2023, her longtime coach Jason Cork summed up the two sides of Diggins as a skier, saying, “She’s really comfortable being uncomfortable, and she insists on having fun.”

Diggins closed her statement about the coming retirement with “Glitter up, ski fans! We’ve got a fun year ahead.”