Afton’s Jessie Diggins clinches third World Cup cross-country skiing overall title

Afton native Jessie Diggins won her third World Cup cross-country skiing title Sunday, clinching her second championship in a row with a sixth-place finish in the 10km freestyle interval start Sunday in Oslo, Norway.

Diggins' lead in the standings shrank to 430 points over Victoria Carl, who finished second in the race to Sweden’s Moa Ilar. But that 430-point gap is big enough that it’s impossible for Carl to catch up to Diggins with three races left in the season, which ends next weekend.

Diggins, 33, is the only American woman to have won an overall championship in cross-country skiing, having first achieved the feat in 2021. She becomes the seventh woman to win at least three World Cup overall titles since the competition officially began in 1982. Finland’s Marjo Matikainen and Norway’s Therese Johaug also have three; Norway’s Bente Skari, Poland’s Justyna Kowalczyk and Norway’s Marit Bjørgen each have four; and Russia’s Yelena Välbe is the record holder with five.

This season, Diggins has won six individual races, including three in 2025, despite the discovery of a partially torn plantar fascia in January. She also won a team sprint silver with American teammate Julia Kern on March 5 at the world championships in Trondheim, Norway.