Jessie Diggins meets with members of the Bill Koch Youth Ski League this past summer at Stratton Mountain. Photo by Kevin O’Connor/VTDigger Many teenagers wallpaper their bedrooms with pinups of hot celebrities. Jessie Diggins, the most-awarded U.S. cross-country skier in history, instead tack ed up an “Endless Winter” poster of a less-recognized hero: Vermonter Bill Koch, the first American Nordic racer to win an Olympic medal. “He looked like he was having fun,” Diggins, who grew up in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb of Afton, Minnesota, recently recalled of the athlete-in-action shot. “It was the pure joy of life. That for me is what it’s all about.” Moving to the Green Mountain State in 2012, a 20-year-old Diggins joined Stratton’s SMS T2 elite training team in hopes of following in Koch’s footsteps.  READ MORE “I took a blind leap of faith as this young, naive total nobody when I moved out here,” she said in an interview. Fourteen years later, Diggins — currently ranked the globe’s No. 1 female cross-country skier, with Olympic gold, silver and bronze medals and three overall-season World Cups — is set to wrap up her racing career this March after her fourth and final Winter Games. “Her world-class engine, her unique combination of fearlessness and vulnerability, and her willingness to tell the world about her frailties is what has made Diggins an icon to plenty of people,” the New York Times wrote in its report on her pending retirement. For all her stratospheric success, Diggins remains down-to-earth. Take her turn as a de facto cater-waiter when she crushed bags of ice into a beverage tub at a recent $100-a-plate Stratton dinner in her honor. “This community really took me in,” the 34-year-old said. “I honestly believe this is the best place in the world to train. You feel really supported, and I’m able to get all the things that I need to learn and grow.” It’s why Diggins keeps finding ways to give back. ‘A whole different story’ Diggins, born in the pre-digital days of 1991, doesn’t have a trope childhood memory of skiing before walking. Instead, she first saw Nordic racing on a VHS tape. “I’m not going to lie,” she wrote in her 2020 memoir “Brave Enough.” “I wasn’t all that into it.” Diggins changed her mind when she learned that winners left with a prize. Joining the Minnesota Youth Ski League at age 3, Diggins ran out of levels to compete in by 10. Worried about juggling homework with practice six days a week, she almost didn’t join the cross-country team in seventh-grade, only to train with the varsity girls and, by her senior year of high school, score straight As and a state championship. “On the outside, school and sports and dating were going great,” she wrote. “But on the inside, it was a whole different story.” While classmates saw her as an all-American free spirit and picture of fitness, Diggins — watching her body morph from a girl to a woman — began to eye what she thought was fat. Her memoir recounts her struggle with eating disorders before a family intervention led her to the national Emily Program nonprofit treatment network. “I’m so lucky to be here and be alive,” she wrote. “This secret, left to its own devices, might have killed me.” Jessie Diggins wins U.S. cross-country’s first-ever Olympic gold medal at the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea. NBC photo Diggins earned entrance to the U.S. ski team and World Cup racing circuit in 2011, spurring her move to Vermont the next year. Training with Stratton’s SMS T2 crew, she soon found herself alongside one of its founders: Koch, who acquiesced to autographing her childhood poster. Diggins would compete in the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, then win U.S. cross-country’s first-ever Olympic gold medal in 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and a silver (after a bout of food poisoning) and bronze in 2022 in Beijing, China. In World Cup racing, Diggins became the first American woman to score the season Nordic title in 2021 (Koch became the first U.S. man to do so in 1982) and repeated the feat in 2023 and 2025. Headed back to the Olympics, Diggins is plugging into social media to connect with fans in her home state of Minnesota, training site in Vermont and Boston suburb where she lives with her husband, financial analyst Wade Poplawski, in Massachusetts. The skier happily lays claim to them all. “I’ve been welcomed and adopted by all these different states,” she said. “It’s triple the love.” ‘I have a much bigger platform’ Diggins has yet to announce what she’ll do upon retiring after this March’s World Cup finals in Lake Placid, New York, although she’s noted a desire to start a family and already has after-hours partnerships with the Emily Program, the climate-advocating Protect Our Winters and the ski-instructing Share Winter Foundation. For several summers, Diggins has joined the Bill Koch Youth Ski League for a fundraising hike up Stratton Mountain. Asked this past August for her biggest challenge, she told students about the 50-kilometer skate at last year’s world championship in Trondheim, Norway. “I came in as a heavy medal favorite,” she recalled. “There were a lot of cameras and lights and pressure on me.” Three minutes into the long race, she lagged behind a large field of competitors and realized she wasn’t going to win. “I had to make a difficult decision. Do I drop out? Do I make some sort of excuse? Or do I finish because I love what I do?” Determined to continue, Diggins pushed forward for the next two hours and 40 minutes. “It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but it was a really good experience,” she said of her 22nd-place finish. “When you win a race, you don’t really learn a whole lot, but when you lose, you get a chance to reexamine: Is this still fun? Do I still love training?” In that moment, Diggins answered affirmatively, propelling her into this current end-on-a-high-note season. “Sometimes,” she told students, “having a really, really bad day is what you need to continue to have good days.” Jessie Diggins signs autographs for members of the Bill Koch Youth Ski League this past summer at Stratton Mountain. Photo by George Forbes, Nordic development coach, Stratton Mountain School After Covid limited crowds at the 2022 Olympics, Diggins is set to travel with her family, friends and trademark face glitter to next month’s Winter Games in Italy. But she’s less interested in the destination than the journey there. “You really have to enjoy the process of what you’re doing every day, because even if you win, the award ceremony will last 10 minutes — and it’ll be the best 10 minutes of your life — and then it will be over,” she said. “If you don’t love working hard, improving, and everything else that goes into it and you get out of it, then winning isn’t going to change your life.” That’s why Diggins focuses on the present rather than the future. “In racing, I want to cross the finish line and look back and say, ‘I used this chance and I gave it my all. That’s the approach I have with advocacy, too. I have a much bigger platform, and I’ve found myself thinking, ‘I have to do something with this.’ If there’s a way I can make a difference, then I want to try.” Read the story on VTDigger here: Capping a historic career, Stratton-trained skier Jessie Diggins is anything but retiring. ...read more read less