Jessie Diggins earned her fifth individual World Cup race win of the season on Friday and will go into her first home World Cup next week riding arguably the best season in U.S. cross-country skiing history.
Diggins, a 32-year-old Olympic and world champion, won a 15km freestyle by 2.6 seconds over Frenchwoman Delphine Claudel in Canmore, Canada.
Diggins tied Kikkan Randall’s American record of five individual World Cup race wins in one season. Diggins officially has six victories this season when including her Tour de Ski title, which added up results from seven races.
Diggins is also up to 10 individual race podiums this season, breaking Randall’s single-season American record.
Randall had nine individual race podiums in 2012-13 and is officially credited with a 10th podium for having the second-best time in a World Cup Finals pursuit where she finished seventh overall.
Diggins leads the standings for the World Cup overall title — which combines results from every race from November into March — by 340 points through 21 of 33 scheduled races. That’s larger than the margin separating second place from sixth place.
In 2021, Diggins became the first non-European woman to win the World Cup overall.
There are three more races in Canmore through Tuesday. Then the circuit comes to the U.S. for the first time in 23 years with a stop next weekend in Minneapolis, 25 miles west of Diggins’ hometown of Afton.
Coverage airs Feb. 18 on CNBC at 12:30 p.m. ET (sprints from the day before) and NBC at 4 p.m. (10km races from earlier that day). All coverage also streams on NBCSports.com, the NBC Sports app and Peacock for subscribers.