Olympic champion skier Jessie Diggins said Wednesday she and a friend were nearly run over and killed by an angry motorist while dryland training over the weekend a few miles from her home in Afton.
Diggins said in a posting on her blog that she and her Stillwater High School coach, Kris Hansen, were roller-skiing single file Sunday morning and left plenty of room for any approaching vehicle when an SUV "buzzed us so close that I was rocked sideways from the wind."
"He could have killed us," Diggins said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "You can't take it back, a moment of road rage."
Diggins also said she understands why the driver hasn't been charged, given that no police officer came to the scene, but "nothing but a verbal warning for almost hitting someone?"
What unfolded on westbound 15th Street S. roughly a third of the way into a 3¼-hour workout, the 27-year-old cross-country gold medalist wrote, was "the most incredible display of aggressive bullying and 'I'm bigger than you and I'm in [an] SUV so I'm going to harass you' that I've ever seen in person."
Diggins said that after the SUV passed them, it stopped on the straight stretch of road with a hill ahead in the distance.
"We tried to ski by him, he kept driving on the right side of the road so that we were forced to the middle of the road," she continued. "When we sped up, he sped up. When we slowed down, he came to a stop, blocking us from getting back to the side of the road.
"I knocked on the window a few times shouting that he was going to get us killed, and he flipped me the finger and turned the music up."