What the U.S. Ski Team Changed After Threshold

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When I asked Matt Whitcomb what surprised him about Threshold, the head coach of the Stifel U.S. Cross-Country Ski Team started by admitting he was tempted to make something up.

“This is the hardest question for me to answer, … but I haven’t watched it. I know it’s life-changing, but I don’t want to go back to that winter,” Whitcomb said. “I did my best as a coach, we all did, and it wasn’t good enough, and I’ve come to terms with my personal experience with it all.”

The winter in question is 2023-24, the season Torsten and Lars Brinkema spent inside the American team with two Sony cinema cameras, a drone, and no feature film credits between them. What came out of it is a documentary about Jessie Diggins and her eating disorder that premiered on Peacock in February and, as of last Friday, is available to rent on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube in the United States and Canada. A European release is planned for later this year.

Whitcomb is the person who let the cameras in. He is also, by his own account, the film’s loudest advocate.

“I know from the response that the film is excellent, and I know it’s changing people’s lives and is being featured in college curricula. I recommend it to everyone I speak to,” he said. “I’m very proud of Torsten and Lars and am grateful for the film. I support it completely.”

“A couple of brothers got a camera for Christmas”

His first answer was no.

“I figured a couple of brothers got a camera for Christmas, had a couple beers, and then came up with a fun way to spend a year,” Whitcomb said. “I normally would’ve erred on the safe side and told them to take a hike, but Ben doesn’t toss around ideas lightly and so I followed up to hear more.”

Ben is Ben Ogden, who raced against Torsten in college on the EISA circuit and had watched him work at the World Cup in Norway that spring. Torsten had gotten there on a shoestring, having talked the Loppet Foundation, the Minneapolis club he and Lars grew up in, into sending him to shoot promotional material ahead of the 2024 World Cup at Theodore Wirth Park.

“I think they were kind of surprised to have an American photographer out there with them,” Torsten said, “just because they aren’t getting much coverage once they leave.”

Ogden pitched Whitcomb on inviting the brothers to the team’s Bend, Oregon camp that summer. The brothers bought cinema cameras and showed up.

What they had in mind at that point was not a film about an eating disorder. It was a film about a sport nobody in America watches, made in the shape of the niche-sport documentaries that had broken through elsewhere.

“We could probably do something like that with skiing,” Torsten said of the pitch they were making to themselves. “Make it look really cool.”

They had one asset that mattered more than the cameras, which is that they were skiers. Diggins had been through the alternative, brand shoots that treated an interval session as something you could run again for a better take.

“This is just something that would never even cross Lars and my mind, to alter the workout, because we know how intense they are,” Torsten said. “We know the workouts. We’ve done them before.”

Toasty, Larry, and a problem with FIS

Whitcomb’s worry was culture, which he describes as something you protect rather than something you have.

The brothers had promised the arrangement would run both ways, that athletes would get usable footage of themselves out of it, and Whitcomb says they delivered. They also collected nicknames. Torsten became Toasty. Lars became Larry, or Lawrence in formal settings.

“These guys were ghosts at times where they would disappear for the day and nobody would see them,” Whitcomb said. “And then we’d see them at dinner and they’d be showing athletes their incredible footage of the team training or racing together.”

They washed dishes. They helped with wax testing. Whitcomb says everyone came to regard them as an addition to the team environment rather than a cost of doing business.

It was not frictionless. At the first race of the season in Finland, Whitcomb watched one of the brothers get chewed out in the finish area by a FIS official for filming in a zone reserved for the television production company. Later, on course in Toblach, he got a text from FIS with a screenshot attached.

“Larry running through the pines, keeping pace in his flatbrim hat and knit sweater, filming the lead pack. He was prominently within the TV feed,” Whitcomb said. “They asked if I could kindly remove him from the world feed. And you know what happened? Nothing. These guys said they were sorry and got a hand slap in each instance. Everyone likes them. They say things like thank you and sorry.”

The rights question got more expensive than a hand slap when it came time to actually build the film. The brothers wanted broadcast footage in the race sequences, the kilometer counters and the commentary, partly because they had decided early that they would never narrate the film themselves. That meant negotiating with Infront, which controls FIS media rights.

“It was an absolute pain in the ass, and that’s kind of all that I’ll say,” Torsten said. “Very expensive.”

The money came from nowhere institutional. The brothers paid their own way through the season and kept fundraising as they went, working through the list of private donors who already keep the U.S. team on the road. The Emily Program, which sponsors Diggins, came in later during the edit and is now bringing the film into treatment centers and educational screenings.

The Hollywood end of it started with a question the brothers asked Diggins at a training camp between the Tour de Ski and the next World Cup stop. They had no connections in that world and needed someone who did. Did she know anybody.

She remembered that Patrick Dempsey had supported the ski team before, and sent him an Instagram message. He answered immediately and told her to send Torsten to his house in Maine, where Dempsey grew up skiing. A couple of months later Torsten showed up at the door and pitched him.

“We have no films to our name. We have a couple short projects that nobody has seen,” Torsten said. “And so we’re asking someone with the credits that he has to trust us with nothing to see for it.”

Dempsey signed on as an executive producer and, by the brothers’ account, became a real voice in shaping the cut. Whitcomb offers it as a character reference. “I mean, Patrick Dempsey signed on with these guys. That should tell you something.”

The pivot happened the following summer

This is the part Whitcomb wanted on the record, because he thinks people have the sequence backward.

“From the start, this movie was meant to highlight the entire team, and not just Jessie,” he said. “Months after the winter concluded, I think the Brinkema brothers realized that the film needed to hone in on the topic of mental health to have a clear storyline. I understood and supported that pivot, but the point is that the winter filming was not targeted at just Jessie. That filming happened the next summer.”

The brothers describe the same thing from inside the edit. They came home with roughly 500 hours of footage and interviews with athletes across several national teams, including Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, Emma Ribom and Federico Pellegrino. Their editor, Yaniv Elani, had never cross-country skied, which they now regard as the reason the film works.

Elani is also the one who made them cut the northern lights. The brothers had stood out in the Arctic Circle for two hours in the cold to get a time lapse they were proud of.

“It’s not serving the story. You got to cut it,” Torsten remembers him saying.

Then came the screenings for film industry people in Los Angeles and New York, where the brothers went in hoping to learn what a non-skiing audience would care about.

“People just kept saying, Jessie, Jessie, we want more Jessie,” Torsten said.

“Our culture was at a 15 or 20-year low that winter”

Whitcomb does not soften the season the film covers.

“For anyone who has seen the movie, I think it’s no secret that our culture was at a 15 or 20-year low that winter. We had major struggles,” he said. He has thought about whether the presence of a film crew contributed to that, and concluded it did not.

He is also insistent that the winter was not one athlete’s crisis with everyone else watching. “It was one of the hardest times for several other athletes and coaches, too. This wasn’t just a Jessie issue. We missed the mark on supportive team culture as an entire team.”

Asked how he handled protecting Diggins against letting the story be told honestly, he rejected the premise.

“I never felt like I had to protect Jessie from the film. She was a part of the team-wide decision to allow the Brinkema brothers into the team for the year, and that was the main gate we kept,” he said. When the brothers asked him whether they could film something sensitive, a one-on-one meeting for instance, he sent them back to the athlete. “I would usually just tell them to ask Jessie what she was comfortable with.”

He watched her closely all the same, and says that had nothing to do with coaching. “That’s just because she’s a close friend, and friends look out for each other. But I had 100% trust in these guys, which is saying something because Lars was 19.”

The person in the hotel room

Leann Bentley is the U.S. Ski & Snowboard communications manager who handles press for the cross country and Para Nordic teams, and she is in the film, mostly doing her job in the background of somebody else’s scene.

She was in the room when the coaching staff decided whether to say yes, and she remembers it being straightforward. Here were two people willing to spend a year telling a story she could not tell herself, and one of them had raced against these athletes in college.

The question she was asked for this story was how she decided where to draw the line once the film’s center became Diggins’ mental health. Her answer was that the question does not describe what happened.

“Short answer, no, I never had to tell them no,” Bentley said. “Long answer is I of course will always protect my athletes. But at the same time, they’re protecting themselves. And throughout this entire process, Jessie was protecting herself. She knew what she wanted to give, and she knew maybe what she didn’t, but she was in charge of it from the very start. And so were all the athletes.”

The scene she keeps coming back to is a hotel room in Ruka before the press conference where Diggins told the assembled media she was dealing with her eating disorder again. Bentley says it was one of the most heavily attended press conferences she has run with her.

“There was a scene where I told her that it’s okay to be vulnerable. And I don’t remember saying that to her,” she said. “It really goes to show that when I work with these athletes, I’m working with them as people, and I’m really glad that came across in the film.”

Most of her season is not spent in hotel rooms in Finland. It is spent in Salt Lake City, awake in the middle of the night, watching the same feed as everybody else and then turning it into the clips and quotes that hundreds of thousands of people see, for twelve teams and more than 240 athletes.

Asked what the film got right about the parts of team life that press coverage never reaches, she was blunt about why the question has an easy answer.

“It got everything right because it was showing exactly what was happening,” Bentley said. Athletes race for a few minutes at a time, a few times a weekend. The rest of it is chess and cards and laundry and going for a run. “I don’t think a lot of people understand that being a professional athlete, you train so hard mentally and physically for what you do on the weekends during a race. And then that race ends and you have, I don’t know, ten more hours of the day left.”

Both she and the brothers land in the same place when asked for a favorite corner of that life, which is the wax truck, known on the road as Yolanda. Torsten’s version involves showing up on dark nights with nothing to do, music playing, occasionally a shot of Jägermeister, and a group of technicians who had been living this way for a decade or more and had stories nobody had ever asked them for.

I interviewed the American wax techs last winter in the lead-up to the Olympics, and they remain the most enjoyable conversations I have had for this site, so I will just agree with him.

What actually changed

The most concrete thing to come out of that winter is not on screen.

Whitcomb describes an Athlete Wellness Passport, a monitoring system covering roughly eight health areas for every athlete on the team, men and women, including bone density, blood panels, caloric balance assessment, menstrual health and a mental health questionnaire. The team dietitian tracks each category for each athlete, and a licensed professional is brought in when a category calls for it.

“It’s a safety net for the whole team,” he said.

What that system did not have in 2023-24 was a ceiling.

“What we were missing in the winter of 2023-24 was a plan for what happens when an athlete’s issue, like an eating disorder, advances beyond the qualifications of our professionals,” Whitcomb said. “In this case, we needed an eating disorder specialist MD on call, and we didn’t have one. We’ve debriefed on the experience extensively and have brought in the person we wish we already had in place going into that winter.”

For coaches who watch the film and want something to do on Monday, his answer starts with an assumption rather than a policy.

“If you coach a team of athletes, you likely coach some athletes who struggle with disordered eating, and you may never know who they are,” he said. He has had male and female athletes tell him about it years after they finished competing.

On his team the practical version is a conversation about meals, held once a year, in which everyone agrees to treat mealtime as a place where safety matters more than opinions.

“Everyone’s plate looks different, and everyone’s dietary needs and goals are different, and many of us are insecure, so the environment is ripe to be judgy and toxic,” Whitcomb said. “Talking it out isn’t perfect, but it helps.”

He got there by getting it wrong first, and he tells that story without cushioning it.

“As a young coach I used to think I could talk openly with athletes about their challenges with eating, body image, and weight. Then I learned from a parent that a comment I made to them regarding weight was harmful. Yeah, I know, duh. But I was 23 and some of you are now, too.”

His correction was to stop talking about any of it and refer everything to professionals, which he now says was better but too absolute. The current version is that he will talk with an athlete who wants to talk, if the trust is there, while being honest about where his expertise ends and activating someone qualified.

What Diggins wants out of it

Diggins raced her last World Cup in Lake Placid in March. She did not do a new interview for this piece, but she wrote at length on Instagram when the film went back out on Friday, and the argument she made was that the documentary is not really about her.

Her request to teams, high school through professional, was that they treat it as “a visual book club.” Watch it, then talk about it. What pressure does this sport put on you. What kind of team do you want to be. And for coaches, find out now where you would send an athlete who comes to you, before one does.

She also made a point the film cannot make on its own, which is that the recovery in it happened in hundreds of hours of therapy and clinical work that were never filmed and could not have been.

When the film premiered in February, she put the goal simply in a U.S. Ski & Snowboard release: “I wanted to help others feel less alone.”

The brothers are working on a scripted film now, set in Minnesota, still as a duo.

Whitcomb, meanwhile, is not planning to watch. He described where the last two years have left him without much interest in tidying it up.

“We’ve made improvements to our system because of lessons from that winter, and we became better coaches and teammates. I’m moving forward as an improved coach.”

And then the part that sounded most like a coaching philosophy: “Your coaches and staff must truly care about the human condition. That’s your foundation. Get rid of the ones who don’t and add more who do.”

Where to watch: Threshold is available to rent on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube in the United States and Canada. It premiered on Peacock in February, and a European release is planned for later this year.

 

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