Stratton-trained athlete Jessie Diggins, the most-awarded U.S. cross-country skier of all time, didn’t let bruised ribs stop her from winning a bronze medal Thursday at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics in Italy.
The 34-year-old racer, set to retire at the end of this winter season, collapsed in pain and triumph as she finished third in the women’s 10-kilometer freestyle competition just four days after injuring herself Sunday during a fall in her sport’s opening 20-kilometer skiathlon.
“Thank you,” Diggins said simply with tears and a smile as she accepted her medal on live television.
Diggins arrived at this year’s games already owning an Olympic medal in every color, having won U.S. cross-country’s first-ever gold medal in 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and a silver (after a bout of food poisoning) and bronze in 2022 in Beijing, China.
Diggins’ latest win cements her status as the nation’s most decorated Nordic racer in history. She’s not only the first U.S. woman to nab a solo cross-country medal but also just the second American to do so, after Vermonter Bill Koch captured silver in 1976. (Landgrove’s Ben Ogden joined the club Tuesday by nabbing silver in the sprint.)
Diggins, who grew up in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb of Afton, Minnesota, moved to the Green Mountain State in 2012 to join Stratton’s SMS T2 elite training team that Koch helped found.
Competing in all six Nordic events at her fourth and final Winter Games, Diggins is set to retire from racing after this March’s World Cup finals in Lake Placid, New York.
Diggins is the fourth U.S. Olympian with Vermont ties to medal in Italy this week.
On Tuesday, the 25-year-old Ogden scored silver as fellow Vermonter Paula Moltzan, 31, of Waitsfield, snagged bronze in the women’s Alpine combined event.
On Wednesday, 33-year-old skier Ryan Cochran-Siegle, a second-generation Alpine racer from Cochran’s Ski Area in Richmond, repeated his Olympic medal-winning feat of four years ago by winning silver in the men’s super-G.
“We need to talk about the Vermont of it all,” the New York Times wrote in a story titled “In the Winter Olympic medal count, tiny Vermont is right up there with Canada.”
