But yes, saying Diggins’s technique is good is just plain wrong, for starters, there is a lot of upper body movement, wasted movement.
Diggins is much closer to a good technique than an awful technique.
I explained my reasoning behind it on the previous page. There is a difference between technique and style. Her style isn’t elegant, but her overall skating technique is pretty good (I’m talking about the technique on normal/good days, she’s not great at keeping the technique on bad days, when she can’t keep the core stable and the upper body comes to far forward. she’s probably one of the women that drops technique/movement the most on bad days together with Frida and Kerttu) and her footwork seems excellent.
Compare her to the opponents and there are very few of the girls that are better. Parmakoski and Flugstad Østberg are the obvious names that spring to mind, the others have also big flaws. Frida is a bit stiff and not finishing each step as good as she could, she’s not fulfilling the potential of the extra centimeters she got. Also one of the few that’s collapsing technically more than Diggins on a bad day. Kalvå is pretty similar to Diggins, good core and footwork but the way she’s using her arms has to be in effective. Victoria Carl has a bit of a strange rotation in hip/upper body. She’s a female Holund. Claudel is elegant, but she’s lacking a lot of strength and she’s seems to be a bit to high up with the upper body meaning she doesn’t get enough power down with the poles. That’s definitively also a technique issue and not only a power issue. Kerttu and Brennan (and girls like Stadlober, Laukli and Bergane) I don’t need to explain. Hennig is my favorite technically in classic, but in skating she has big flaws even if she looks elegant especially in what we call double dance (is that V2 in US?).
I’d place Ilar, all three Weng, Andersson in the more or less the same bracket as Diggins. Also the sprinters Ribom and Sundling. All of them have some issues, but in general they are good at getting the power the right direction. I think it looks like Dolci also have a very good base technique in skating, but as she’s not that often been in the TV screen before today I haven’t thought a lot about her movement yet. She looks stable and able to put more power down than Claudel for example.
Watching clips of Diggins skating from the front you can see that her shoulders doesn’t move that much (you want some movement as you want to have the weight moved over from side to side in each kick), so I think the upper body movement you talk about is over exaggerated and a result of the stupid head movement.
The US skiers seems far behind for example the Norwegians when it comes to technical work and focus on this area. Rosie Brennan literally said on the Devon Kershaw podcast that she doesn’t do specific training for the technique. That is visible. I hope the younger athletes have a more open mind to this specific training. Diggins enormous step forward in classic technique this year indicates that she’s working on it more than Brennan at least.
In general my take is that the best men have better technique than the women in skating, probably because they are much stronger, both in the core and in the upper body. If you compare the girls to the likes of Røthe and Kruger most of them looks pretty bad. In the context of women skiing Diggins is not looking to be at any bigger technical disadvantage at all.
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