Jessie Diggins is grateful for the journey she’s been on since she was a teenager. She wouldn’t trade her career in cross country skiing for the world. It has taken her to places she never could have dreamed of visiting as a kid growing up in Afton, Minn.

After competing at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina, however, Diggins will start the process of sailing off into the sunset. That much is certain following her announcement a few months ago that she planned to retire as soon as the current World Cup campaign comes to a close.

Jessie Diggins, of the United States, competes in the cross country skiing women’s 10km interval start free at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Tesero, Italy, Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026. The Afton native placed third to win her fourth Olympic medal. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)

Asked what she plans to do in the next chapter of her life, the 34-year-old cracked a joke that showed her age, saying, “Well besides knitting and stuff?” She added that she also plans to a lot of gardening in her free time.

If some people think that sounds boring, Diggins doesn’t take offense. She’a been traveling all over the world since making cross country skiing her career. She’s ready to settle down after winning four Olympic medals in total, including a bronze in Thursday’s 10-kilometer interval start freestyle, and three FIS World Cup championships.

“It makes it quite hard to have anything close to a normal life,” Diggins said. “The time has come for me to get really excited about having a normal life.”

That includes as being able to wash her clothes whenever she wants, being able to sleep in her own bed regularly, and to come down with a cold without worrying about how it might affect her livelihood.

Most of all, Diggins is looking forward to spending more quality time with her husband Wade Poplawski. They live together on the outskirts of Boston and plan to call New England home for the foreseeable future.

“He’s been the most supportive person in the world,’ Diggins said. “Now, it’s going got be our time together with me not being on the road.”

That doesn’t mean Diggins will be out of the public eye. She plans to do keynote speaking as a way to continue to make an impact. She’s been a vocal advocate for mental health throughout her career and that isn’t going to change.

“I’m not trying to inspire people by collapsing at the finish line any longer,” Diggins said. “I’m hoping I can inspire people with my words.”

That should be pretty easy considering her experience.

A superpower for Diggins throughout her career has been her willingness to be vulnerable. She’s been open about her struggles with an eating disorder, for example, with hopes of helping people that might be struggling with something similar.

“I’m in this position where I can be there for somebody else,” Diggins said. ” I can give them this gift of, ‘You are not alone.’ ”

That means more to Diggins than winning a gold medal in the team sprint at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, which provided her the platform to speak up in the first place.

As for the normalcy she’s been seeking for so long, Diggins more or less acknowledged that she will never fully escape the gravitational pull that being an elite athlete has on her life. A bucket list item for her in retirement is completing a 100-mile race.

“I want it to be really scenic and beautiful,” Diggins said. “I really like tough trail. I do not want a dirt highway. I want it to be scrambly.”

She laughed.

“It’s kind of ironic to be like, ‘Yeah I’m going to be done with cross country skiing so I can go run 100 miles on trails,’ ” Diggins said. “It really lights up my soul, and I’m really excited to still give myself these challenges.”

All part of continuing to inspire people.

“I’m going to try to give back in all the ways that I can,” Diggins. “I still want to be the best role model that I can be.”

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Today is Saturday, Feb. 14, the 45th day of 2026. There are 320 days left in the year. This is Valentine’s Day.

Today in history:

On Feb. 14, 1929, the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” took place in a Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone’s gang were gunned down.

Also on this date:

In 1779, English explorer James Cook was killed on the island of Hawai’i during a confrontation after Cook’s attempt to kidnap Hawaiian monarch Kalaniʻōpuʻu as leverage to recover a boat stolen from one of Cook’s ships.

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In 1876, inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied separately for patents related to the telephone. (The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled Bell the rightful inventor.)

In 1984, 6-year-old Stormie Jones became the world’s first heart-liver transplant recipient when the surgery was performed at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. The girl died in 1990 at age 13.

In 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses,” a novel the ayatollah condemned as blasphemous against Islam.

In 2013, double-amputee Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, at his home in Pretoria, South Africa, saying he mistook her for an intruder; he was later convicted of murder and served nearly nine years of a sentence of 13 years and five months before being released from prison in January 2024.

In 2017, a former store clerk, Pedro Hernandez, was convicted in New York of murder in one of the nation’s most haunting missing-child cases, nearly 38 years after 6-year-old Etan Patz (AY’-tahn payts) disappeared while on the way to a school bus stop.

In 2018, a former student opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people in the nation’s deadliest school shooting since the Sandy Hook Elementary School attack in Newtown, Connecticut, more than five years earlier. (Nikolas Cruz pleaded guilty to murder in October 2021 and was later sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.)

In 2023, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that more than 35,000 people died in Turkey as a result of an earthquake on Feb. 6, making it the deadliest such disaster since the country’s founding 100 years earlier. (The combined death toll in Turkey and neighboring Syria would surpass 50,000 people).

Today’s birthdays:

Former New York City mayor and businessman Michael Bloomberg is 84.
Saxophonist Maceo Parker is 83.
Journalist Carl Bernstein is 82.
Magician Teller (Penn and Teller) is 78.
Opera singer Renée Fleming is 67.
Actor Meg Tilly is 66.
Football Hall of Famer Jim Kelly is 66.
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio is 59.
Actor Simon Pegg is 56.
Rock singer Rob Thomas (Matchbox Twenty) is 54.
Former NFL quarterback Drew Bledsoe is 54.
Actor Danai Gurira is 48.
Actor Freddie Highmore is 34.
Actor Madison Iseman is 29.

The St. Thomas women’s hockey team was unable to put up much of a fight at No. 10 Minnesota-Duluth Friday night, falling 3-0 to the Bulldogs on the shore of Lake Superior.

After a scoreless first period, Tommies goaltender Julia Minotti continued to keep UMD off the board until the hosts netted a power-play tally at 5:53 of the middle frame. That goal proved to be the game winner, yet the Bulldogs popped in two more in the final period — the first coming short handed at 2:50, the second on an empty net at 18:11.

Minotti finished the game with 32 saves, while her teammates put 24 shots on the UMD goal to no avail.

With the loss, the Tommies (12-18-1 overall, 7-17-1 WCHA) were passed by St. Cloud State and fell into seventh place in the conference standings after the Huskies beat WCHA cellar dweller Bemidji State on Friday. The Bulldogs (16-12-3, 12-10-3) have already clinched a fourth-place regular-season finish in the circuit, 17 points ahead of fifth-place Minnesota State, 14 points behind third-place Minnesota.

St. Thomas and UMD finish their weekend series at 3 p.m. Saturday.

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It was a split result for the Minnesota hockey teams in their respective road matchups on Friday night, with the men winning at Notre Dame while the women fell at Ohio State.

Men squander lead, win in shootout

It was a matchup featuring two of the three teams bringing up the rear in the Big Ten Conference, and the Gopher men teetered falling even further in the circuit standings before pulling out a shootout win.

After squandering a 2-0 lead they’d held for the better part of two periods, Minnesota recovered to claim the extra point with a shootout win after recording an official 2-2 tie against the Irish.

John Mittlestadt put the visitors on the board at 11:09 of the opening period, with Brodie Ziemer increasing the advantage to 2-0 just 26 seconds later.

The score remained static through the second stanza before Notre Dame struck 46 seconds into the third frame to cut the lead in half. The Irish knotted the count at 2-all just under seven minutes later to send the game through a scoreless overtime and into the shootout, where the visitors pulled out the victory though the game officially ends as a tie in the standings.

Goaltender Luca Di Pasquo made 28 saves for the Gophers (10-18-2 overall, 6-12-1 Big Ten), while opposing netminder Nicholas Kempf made 31 saves for Notre Dame (5-20-4, 1-15-1).

The two teams play again at 5 p.m. Saturday in South Bend, Ind. in a game televised on NBCSN and Peacock.

Women doubled up in battle of No. 2 vs. No. 3

While the Gopher men languish near the bottom of the Big Ten standings, the Minnesota women remain near the top of the WCHA order.

However, this weekend looked to be a tall task as the third-ranked women’s squad took on No. 2 Ohio State on its home ice.

The Buckeyes proved just how tough it will be to earn a point in Columbus, Ohio by taking a 4-0 lead through two periods before the visitors managed to notch two goals of its own in the final frame.

Unfortunately for the Gophers, scores by Anabella Fanale and Ava Lindsay got them just halfway there before the final horn as Ohio State claimed the 4-2 win.

Goaltender Hannah Clark made 35 saves for Minnesota (24-6-1 overall, 18-6-1 WCHA) as her counterpart, Hailey Macleod, made 26 saves for the Buckeyes (27-4, 21-4).

While the Gophers have clinched at least a third-place finish in the regular-season race, the loss dropped the team six points behind second-place Ohio State and eight points back of conference-leading Wisconsin with three games remaining until the playoffs.

The first of those games comes at 2 p.m. Saturday afternoon in the series finale against the Buckeyes in a game televised on both BTN+ and Fox 9+.

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