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Therese Johaug topped a 1-2 finish for Norway in the Tour de Ski with a dominant win in the final climbing stage Sunday, foiling American Jessie Diggins’ bid to win the event for a second straight year and third time overall.
Norway’s Astrid Oeyre Slind took second, 47 seconds behind Johaug throughout the seven-stage event. Diggins finished third overall, 2 minutes, 41 seconds off the lead.
The weeklong event, part of the World Cup season, is the most grueling in cross-country skiing, featuring seven stages over nine days and more than 80 kilometers of racing, testing both the classic method (where skiers move in a straight-line motion over tracks in the snow) and freestyle (where skiers push off to the sides, like skating), as well as sprint and endurance distances.
Sunday’s final stage was a 10-kilometer freestyle climb up an alpine skiing course with an average 12-percent grade in Val de Fiemme, Italy, which will host cross-country skiing at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics. Diggins started the day in third place overall, one minute, 47 seconds off the lead.
Diggins, 33, led after each of the first three stages and won the first two — including her first-ever win in the classic style — and had the early advantage to defend her title from 2023-24. But Johaug and Slind, both 36, dominated the middle climbing stages to pass the American, then finished 1-2 in the final climb to seal their spots atop the podium.
Johaug completed Sunday’s stage in 35:59, 25.5 seconds ahead of Slind. Diggins took sixth in the final stage, finishing 54.3 seconds behind Johaug.
It was a record-tying fourth Tour de Ski win for Johaug. She joins Poland’s Justyna Kowalczyk, Switzerland’s Dario Cologna and fellow Norwegian Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo, who won the men’s title earlier Sunday, as four-time winners of the 19-year-old event.
The 28-year-old Klaebo, a sprinter, rolled to his fourth title, finishing 1:23 ahead of Austrian Mika Vermeulen in the overall standings and adding to a decorated mantel that includes five Olympic and nine world championship golds.
Johaug hadn’t raced the Tour de Ski since getting her third title in 2020. She retired from elite competition after the 2021-22 season but returned this year and has four wins and eight podiums this season, now second overall in the World Cup standings.
“It was not my goal, this isn’t, because I shouldn’t be here,” Johaug said after the race, “but (things) happen, and I’m so happy I decided to be in the tour.”
With American alpine skiing star Lindsey Vonn in attendance to cheer her on, Diggins collapsed across the finish line after earning her fourth podium in the Tour de Ski. In an interview with The Athletic last month, Diggins described the feeling of finishing one of the most punishing endurance tests in all of sports.
“When you finish, there is immense satisfaction, and it also kind of feels like you’re drunk, but without any of the fun parts of being drunk. You just feel tired and slightly dizzy and just slightly out of it, like I’m floating along in my body, just kind of floating through life. …
“That’s how I feel at the end of the tour. Like I need to sleep for about 17 hours, and I know I’m about to have the worst night of sleep in my life because my body is just gonna have a hard time switching off at the end of it all.”
The 10 different women who have won the Tour de Ski at least once since its inception in 2006-07 have combined for 49 Olympic medals, with 21 golds. The 11 men’s champions have hauled in 39 Olympic medals, with 18 golds.
The Tour de Ski has an outsized impact on the overall World Cup standings given the large chunk of points to be collected across the various stages and for finishes in the overall standings. With the third-place finish, Diggins retained her overall lead there. She’s finished first or second in the full-season standings the last four years, with wins in 2021 and 2024.
In 2018, Diggins and Kikkan Randall became the first Americans to earn an Olympic gold medal in cross-country when they won the women’s team sprint in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Diggins added individual silver and bronze medals in Beijing in 2022, giving her a hand in three of the four Olympic medals ever won by Americans in a sport ruled by the Scandinavian countries and Russia. American Bill Koch also won a silver in the 30-kilometer in Innsbruck in 1976.
GO DEEPER
Jessie Diggins talks cross-country skiing’s most grueling test: the Tour de Ski
(Photo of Jessie Diggins after finishing Saturday’s penultimate stage: Grega Valancic / VOIGT / Getty Images)
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