The athletes of the Year
BY LISA LYNN and ABAGAEL GILES
Who made the news—or made history—in 2018? Here’s a look back at the exceptional performances and contributions to sports athletes from around the state made this past year.
NORDIC’S golden GIRL: JESSIE DIGGINS
“Here comes Diggins! here comes Diggins!” For anybody who viewed the women’s cross-country team sprint at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics, those words are forever etched in our brains. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” screamed NBC analyst Chad Salmela, a Middlebury college graduate, into his mic as Jessie Diggins, with teammate Kikkan Randall, secured the U.S. team’s first ever Olympic gold medal in cross country skiing.
It was the highlight of Diggins’ profession in a season that was Camiseta Sanfrecce Hiroshima exceptional. beyond her gold-medal performance, Diggins had best-ever finishes in every Olympic race, taking fifth in the skiathlon and 10-kilometer freestyle races, sixth in the classic sprint, seventh in the 30k free, and she anchored the 4 x 5km relay to finish fifth. (Until the 2018 Olympics, the best finish for the American women had been Sophie Caldwell’s sixth place in the freestyle sprint at the 2014 Olympic winter season Games).
In 23 world cup races last season, Diggins finished in the top 10 twenty times, putting her in second place overall, just 40 points shy of claiming the overall crystal globe trophy (Heidi Weng of Norway won).
So why is Diggins, who hails from Afton, Minnesota, one of Vermont’s athletes of the Year? because for the last six years, the 27-year-old has trained in the green Mountains and owns a condo in Stratton.
Diggins moved to Vermont in the summer of 2012. She had just finished a successful first season on the world cup tour, taking second in what was only her third world cup race (a team sprint with Kikkan Randall) and regularly earning points.
In spring 2012, she learned that her two coaches on the CXC Elite team, Jason Cork and Gus Kaeding, were leaving—Cork to the U.S. men’s team and Kaeding to his alma mater, Stratton mountain school in Vermont. Sverre Caldwell, SMS’s Nordic director, was about to launch the SMS T2 team, a post-graduate team of elite skiers with their eye on world cup competition. Caldwell’s daughter, Sophie, was on the team, along with world cup sprinters Andy Newell and Simi Hamilton. Kaeding would be their coach. To Diggins, 21 at the time, it looked like a good fit.
“Most kids go off to college, so this was sort of my version of, OK, I want to try something new,” said Diggins.
Still young, Diggins knew it was essential to stick with a trainer whose style of training worked for her. “That was a really big essential thing to have that count on already there,” she said, “to not start over with someone new.”
She also liked her new teammates. “I was like ‘Wow, this is awesome, their strengths and my strengths are very different things, which is what you need in purchase for everyone to raise the level,’” she explained. “For example, if you get a ton of people who are all really good at classic distance, you don’t improve in freestyle sprinting. So, it’s really cool that we all brought something new to the table.”
The change of scene worked well for Diggins. After her first season training with the SMS T2 team, she became a world champion, along with Randall, on the team sprint.
Diggins has come to love her adopted home. outside of race season, she spends about five months a year in Vermont—minus travel for training camps and for sponsor obligations. one of her favorite workouts is level 3 ski-walking up Stratton with the younger skiers on the SMS team. “It’s really fun to have that much uphill,” she said. “You go up, and yes, we do have to jog down, but just having that much hill is really fun. It’s a beautiful view at the top, it’s a very gratifying workout. then you see all these people from the area hiking, Camiseta Schalke 04 which is also very cool. There are so numerous people enjoying being outside.”
Diggins can also be found roller-skiing and running along the quiet paved roads around Stratton. One summer Diggins mapped out a marathon-length route on the Appalachian Trail. The route crossed four 3,000-plus-foot peaks and took 6 hours, 45 minutes—and ended up being closer to 30 miles. “To be able to run up and over mountains, it was such an empowering feeling,” she said.
And during the summer leading up to the 2018 Olympic Games, she roller-skied 100 kilometers—“because if you can ski for six-and-a-half hours straight, you can do anything,” she said. —Peggy Shinn
BUILDING THE CROSS-COUNTRY LEGACY: SOPHIE CALDWELL
It’s hard to single out any two members of a team Camiseta Vissel Kobe that, as a whole, has been rocketing upward in the rankings. but along with Jessie Diggins, this past year, Vermont native Sophie Caldwell sprinted her way to multiple world cup podiums.
A scion of Putney’s legendary family of Olympians (her grandfather, John Caldwell literally wrote the book on cross-country skiing; her father, Sverre Caldwell, runs thenullnull