It’s a broadcast moment etched in U.S. Olympic history.
Jessie Diggins rounds the final turn of the team sprint in the Alpensia Cross-Country Skiing Centre in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in second place, just behind Sweden’s Stina Nilsson.
Diggins and her teammate, Kikkan Randall, were the United States’ best shot at ending its cross-country skiing medal drought — maybe even securing a first-ever gold. Opportunities had come and gone throughout the 2018 Winter Olympics, with Diggins finishing in the top six but out of the medal standings in four previous competitions, and only two events remained.
“They’re all completely gassed! They’ve given it everything on the Klæbo-bakken (the nickname for the course’s final hill)! Stina Nilsson leading Jessie Diggins into the final turn!” says color analyst Chad Salmela, nearly cutting himself off. He’s saying more words in one breath than sounds humanly possible. “CAN DIGGINS ANSWER?!”
Play-by-play broadcaster Steve Schlanger calmly takes over as the athletes enter the straightaway: “As the roars rattle around the cross-country stadium in Pyeongchang, Sweden, the U.S. and Norway coming to the line —”
Salmela interjects, screaming now:
“HERE COMES DIGGINS! HERE COMES DIGGINS!”
Moments later, as Diggins makes her move on Nilsson and crosses the finish in first place, Salmela interrupts again, voice hoarse, standing up, arms raised in the air:
“YES! YES! YES! YES!”
It was 7 p.m. in South Korea when the team sprint began. But it was 5 a.m. ET for Salmela and Schlanger, calling the historic moment in a dark broadcast booth at NBC’s studios in Stamford, Conn., next to a Dunkin’ Donuts, no mountains in sight.
The segment wouldn’t air until hours later. By the time it did, Diggins and Randall’s historic gold was quickly becoming not just an iconic moment at the 2018 Games, but a moment that would change U.S. cross-country skiing forever. And with it came Salmela’s line, joining the lexicon of great calls in U.S. sports history.
And one thing you should know, as Diggins prepares for another team sprint Wednesday in what will be her final Olympics: That call almost never aired.
For starters, Schlanger was not even originally scheduled to call cross-country skiing. He was calling biathlon with Salmela, along with other Olympic events, but had never called cross-country skiing until he got added to the sport’s coverage at the last minute.
“I had to get up to speed pretty quickly,” said Schlanger, who estimates that he has called more than 30 different sports in his 25-year career.
And Salmela? He was not supposed to call it that way.
“Chad (Salmela) was … trained to get out of the play-by-play’s way on a finish of a race,” said Michael Shames, who produced the broadcast for NBC. “On a finish, that’s where play-by-play calls the moment, and calls it home.”
Salmela agrees.
“(Schlanger’s) got the call, and I know that Steve has to take the call home,” Salmela recalled. “Steve and I have done a lot of calls up to that point. And I didn’t want to mess up Steve’s call. That was not my goal. And what I did was really not appropriate. That is not what commentators are trained to do.”
Steve Schlanger (left) and Chad Salmela, in NBC’s Stamford studio on the morning of the historic gold-medal win for Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall. (Courtesy of Chad Salmela)
Salmela grew up in Minnesota — Diggins’ home state — in a town called Mountain Iron, part of a historic mining area called the Iron Range. In the 1980s, the region invested in cross-country skiing trails, helping diversify the local economy beyond mining by growing its outdoor recreation industry.
Salmela was raised among those trails in a family of cross-country skiers, and was a member of the U.S. biathlon team on and off for eight years in his late teens and 20s. He made multiple unsuccessful runs for the U.S. Olympic team, falling just short in his final attempt in 1998 — a moment he still calls “a heartbreaker” — followed by a stint coaching biathlon and a career in commentating ski racing.
So when Salmela saw Diggins making her move on that final stretch of track in Pyeongchang, it was personal.
“That moment found a place in me, that probably portrayed a lifelong history of love for the sport, that nobody ever understood,” Salmela said. “I spent two decades almost at that point loving the sport, being a part of it, and kind of always never being a superstar, but always being close.”
You can hear it in his voice.
YES. YES. YES. YES.
Seconds after Jessie Diggins fell to the snow in exhaustion that night in South Korea, teammate Kikkan Randall rushed out to celebrate with her. (Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP via Getty Images)
When the recording wrapped, Salmela immediately offered to record another take. While he and Schlanger commented on the event live, the segment would not air for hours. They could have a do-over.
“My initial feeling, honestly, when I did the call was, ‘I screwed up. We’re gonna have to go back and retake that,’” Salmela said.
Schlanger, meanwhile, was not surprised by Salmela’s interjection. The two had worked together in the past, and Schlanger knew Salmela could be an “excitable guy.”
“Even though it felt like he could have stepped on me, he really didn’t in a lot of ways. I think that it just worked,” he said.
But Schlanger also asked about a re-tape — not because he was upset with Salmela, but because he is a perfectionist.
“I could give what would be considered maybe the perfect call, and I would still think about redoing it,” Schlanger said.
Shames immediately said no.
“It’s one of the greatest calls I think I’ve ever heard, and there was no way we were going to replicate that,” he said. “Every time I watch it, I still get chills.”
Both Schlanger and Salmela slept through the broadcast when it aired a few hours later. They only realized the moment took off the way it did when their phones started buzzing, and buzzing, and buzzing.
Looking back, Schlanger thinks the call resonated the way it did because of the authentic emotion brought to such a high-stakes moment. For a broadcaster who has called dozens of sports across decades, that feeling doesn’t happen often.
“Rarely, if ever, as a broadcaster do you reach an audience and connect like this,” Schlanger said. “To resonate this deeply with viewers is the ultimate goal, but it is also the most elusive. With so many sports, events, shows and content these days, it’s hard to break through. To make people feel this way, even in a single moment, is the most gratifying experience I can have in my job.”
Diggins didn’t hear the call until after the fact, as it circulated on social media and continued to air on NBC.
“I was like, ‘Holy s—, that’s an incredible call,’” she said.
Diggins has never gone back and rewatched that race — “I’m not someone who replays glory moments. That’s just not my style,” she said — but organizers often play it when she does speaking events.
“What I love about the call is you can just so clearly feel Chad’s passion,” Diggins said. “I think he just did an amazing job of bringing people into that sense of excitement and just the enormity of that moment.”
Years ago, that type of emotion might have been considered unacceptable. Salmela pointed to the late commentator Dick Bank, who NBC fired in 1964 for his excited and now similarly iconic call of American Billy Mills’ shocking upset in the 10,000-meter race at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. “Look at Mills! Look at Mills!” Bank yelled.
“I’m not naive as to think this is a call for all ages, because in certain times in the media, that would not have been an acceptable call by a lot of people,” Salmela said.
Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall celebrate their gold medal in 2018 — still the only Olympic gold in cross-country for the U.S. (Odd Andersen / AFP via Getty Images)
Salmela knows he is not everyone’s cup of tea, but said he has seen a growing acceptance of — even preference for — authentic emotion.
“I have a lot of critics,” he said. “They have a good point. They say, ‘He is so tiresome to listen to when he gets excited for no reason; he’s always too high and too excited.’ I am excited. I think these sports are great, I love them, and I come at it with an enthusiasm.”
Salmela continued: “In that call, or any call I do, the call I’m going to do tomorrow morning, they’re all genuine. I am a genuine person, and I try to be genuine. As soon as I step even a moment away from being genuine, I can hear it. And I don’t want to go there.”
Media culture has changed since NBC fired Bank. The morning of the team sprint that day in 2018, Shames ran Salmela’s call by his bosses before the broadcast aired. NBC ran it.
Schlanger sees the moment as part of the move towards sport highlight culture, where people often watch snippets in place of full competitions.
Call it the viral era.
For cross-country skiing, which has a small mainstream audience in the U.S. outside the Olympics, and which, as an endurance sport, often doesn’t translate well to highlights, Diggins and Randall’s dramatic win was just what the sport needed.
In the years since, the pair have been credited with helping grow cross-country skiing in the U.S. and deepen Team USA’s field. In 2024, Minnesota hosted the first cross-country skiing World Cup event in the U.S. in more than 20 years, an effort in which Diggins was involved. With plans to retire after this season, Diggins will finish her career at another home World Cup, in Lake Placid, N.Y., in March.
Of course, it was the athletes’ lights-out performance in the team sprint that put the sport on the national stage. But a little marketing never hurts.
“I feel a lot of gratitude when I’m listening to it because I’m like, I know what this did for the sport,” Diggins said. “Obviously, I had to sprint really well at the finish, but if it had been a call that was like, ‘And they won’ — like, that was it — there would have been way less growth potential for everyone. Every single one of my younger teammates who’s competing right now gets to benefit from that moment.”
Diggins continued: “It’s cliché, but it’s like, if a tree falls and it doesn’t make a sound and no one hears it, did anything happen?”
Eight years later, Salmela and Schlanger have reunited in the Stamford broadcast booth for the Milan Cortina games. They are joined by Randall, who retired in 2018 and worked with the pair on the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
Now, it’s Diggins on the brink of retirement, looking to end her historic career on her own terms.
Here she comes.