Team USA’s Jessie Diggins has won an Olympic bronze in cross-country skiing on Tuesday, the first-ever sprint medal for Americans in the sport.
Diggins finished the race with a time of 3:12:84 and secured third, beating out teammate Rosie Brennan at the National Cross-Country Skiing Center in Zhangjiakou, China. Sweden’s Jonna Sundling and Maja Dahlqvist came in first and second, respectively.
Diggins is the first American woman to win an Olympic cross-country skiing medal in an individual event. The bronze medal comes three days after Diggins participated in her first race of the Beijing Olympics, the women’s 15km, when she finished sixth.
Ahead of the Beijing Olympics, she told “CBS Mornings” correspondent Jamie Yuccas that she hates the “what-if game.”
“I like crossing that finish line knowing that there was not one drop of energy that I held back,” she said.
It’s the second Olympics medal for Diggins. She and her now-retired teammate Kikkan Randall won the first-ever U.S. gold medal in cross country skiing in the Pyeongchang Olympics. Their victory inspired a new generation of skiers in a sport that had long been dominated by rivals from Scandinavia.
The Afton, Minnesota native joined a local ski league when she was three years old. She was the first American to win the FIS Tour de Ski and win the overall and distance World Cup titles.
