“Jessie has always said that Olympic medal belongs to everyone,” said Bolger, a 28-year-old sprint specialist who has been on the national team the past three years.
No one pays closer attention to Diggins than Julia Kern, a 24-year-old who went to Dartmouth and was Diggins’s roommate in Europe last season and trains with Diggins in Vermont. Kern was competing in a lower-tier race in Germany four years ago when Diggins and Randall won the gold medal in Pyeongchang. She and her teammates pushed back a training session so they could watch the race live, then bragged about it to everyone they spoke with that night.
When Kern was first getting to know Diggins, she said, she was eager to learn the ingredients of her secret sauce. Living with Diggins, Kern quickly realized there was no secret: Diggins, she said, eats right, sleeps well, trains hard and does what she needs to do to recover for the next workout. And then she wakes up and does it all over again, day after day after day, believing that the work that produced her gold medal can one day produce another.
Her success has brought higher expectations, and a new level of pressure. Diggins manages it with mental, physical and technical preparation: countless hours watching video, timing drills to improve her classical skiing technique in an effort to become a more formidable all-around skier.
She has started meditating, so she can calm herself and lower her heart rate before races. She has also honed her visualization skills so she can close her eyes and see every turn of the Olympic course that was built into the side of a punishing hill in Yanqing.