Documenting a Triumphant Ski Story
Torsten Brinkema ’22 makes a documentary film about an Olympic champion
On a cold November night two years ago, Torsten Brinkema ’22 was on a plane bound north of the Arctic Circle with a suitcase stuffed with camera equipment and a head full of dreams.
It was a pinch-me moment for the recent graduate, who was headed to Muonio, Finland, to film Olympic gold medalist cross-country ski racer Jessie Diggins as she competed in the International Ski and Snowboard Federation’s season-opening cross-country ski race there.
Brinkema and his younger brother, Lars, both budding filmmakers, were making a documentary about Diggins, the most decorated American cross-country skier of all time.
The skier, known for wearing glitter on her cheeks during races and her ebullient demeanor, rocketed to fame at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. That’s when she and teammate Kikkan Randall brought home America’s first cross-country skiing gold medal, the country’s first medal in the sport in more than 40 years. She’s also won three World Cup overall titles, two other Olympic medals, and seven World Championship medals, and is planning to retire from racing next year.
The brothers were thrilled to get out on the snow in the hazy sunlight of the short Arctic days, and under the dancing, colorful show of the Northern Lights—a near-nightly occurrence in Muonio at that time of year—to search for the best ways to tell her story.
“Jessie has just had the most amazing legacy and impact on her small community in Minnesota, and also across the country and across the globe. She’s a super charismatic, honest, vulnerable athlete who knows how to push herself to limits that feel beyond human capacity,” Brinkema, 26, said. “She also knows how to be real, and to be human, and to be honest about her struggles.”
Ultimately, the Brinkema Brothers, as their production company is called, spent a year on the road with Diggins and the rest of the U.S. cross-country ski team to shoot footage for their new documentary, Threshold. They worked with producer and actor Patrick Dempsey, a Maine native, lifelong skier, and fan of Diggins, to make the film.
The brothers are hoping to premiere the movie just before the 2026 Winter Olympics, which will take place in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, in February. Right now, they’re applying to film festivals and working to get it widely distributed through a streaming service.
“We are entranced with the ski world,” Brinkema said. “We love to film it and capture it in our unique way on skis and in these winter landscapes.”
An important story
They’re proud of the documentary, which took an unexpected turn partway through filming when Diggins revealed she had had a relapse of an eating disorder she had first struggled with as a teenager. Her disclosure led to a film that is a lot more personal and powerful than a typical sports documentary.
“It feels like there can be a big stigma around talking about mental health and being vulnerable. And now we have someone on camera being really vulnerable and telling us everything that’s going on. We just realized that, wow, this is a story we have to tell,” Brinkema said. “I want to tell meaningful stories that feel like they have an impact on people.”
For Diggins, the decision to invite the Brinkemas to tell her whole story was the “biggest trust-fall exercise” of her life.
“To be honest, it scared me deeply to have anyone look too closely at what was happening inside my brain or what was happening to my body as I pushed through an eating disorder relapse, sought help, and recovered in the public spotlight while racing at the highest level of sport,” she said. “But as I got to know Torsten and Lars, I also got to know their kindness, their empathy, and their sincerity in wanting to tell my story in order to help people.”
Ultimately, Diggins decided to fully open up to the brothers because she wanted to help other people “avoid the hell” that she had gone through with her eating disorder.
“I truly believed in their ability to tell my story without dramatization or embellishment, yet without shying away from the hard truth of what I went through,” she said. “I think we all share the same goals with this film, and I’m really honored that they’ve put so much heart and soul into this project.”
A winding road
If there’s a direct path to becoming a documentary filmmaker, Brinkema definitely did not take it. Still, it’s easy to spot the threads and experiences that led to him rising to the challenge of making a documentary about a major sports figure at such a young age.
He and his brother grew up in Minneapolis, where they began cross-country skiing as children and excelled at the sport. Along the way, they trained alongside and got to know many of the coaches and athletes in their region.
“It’s such a small little community that everyone kind of knows each other,” Brinkema said.
At Colby, the studio art major joined the Nordic ski team, raced in the competitive ski carnival circuit, and served as team captain his senior year.
He also spent a semester working on an independent study project that joined his passions for art, filmmaking, and the natural world. Under the guidance of sculptor and Associate Professor of Art Bradley Borthwick, Brinkema handcrafted a wooden surfboard from northern white cedar sustainably harvested in Maine. The short film he made about the process, Tree to Board, was selected for the 2021 Maine Outdoor Film Festival. It also gave him a vision for a future in which he could continue to both make art and spend time outside.
After graduation, he continued to seek filmmaking work, making small commercial films for friends and family to pay the rent. Forging his path as a budding filmmaker in a hyper-competitive field felt daunting, but as he wrestled with the kind of questions that have long plagued young artists, Brinkema was determined.
“I wanted to make a name for myself so that I can succeed in the art world and do things that make me happy,” he said. “I also wanted to make a living from it.”
Then, in early 2023, the phone rang.
It was a fateful call. On the other line was Minneapolis’ Loppet Foundation, which has a mission to connect people with the outdoors, and they had a proposition for Brinkema that wound up changing his life. Foundation officials were planning for the 2024 Stifel Loppet Cup in Minnesota, the first World Cup ski event held in the U.S. since 2001.
“They said they needed someone who could go to Norway and take photos of the U.S. team and get people psyched for the event,” Brinkema said. “They knew I had done some photo and video work. And once I heard about the opportunity, I said, ‘You have to send me.’”
‘Awesome vibes’
Once on the World Cup circuit, he felt lucky to shoot races that attracted as many as 100,000 people, a far cry from the attendance of races back home.
“If you get 100 people to show up for a race, you’re psyched,” Brinkema said. “I realized then that, wow, this is an underrepresented sport in the U.S., and nobody’s really telling these stories in the film or photo medium. When I got back, I was proud of the photos I took, but I thought there was something more to explore.”
A couple weeks after he returned, he was invited to document the U.S. cross-country team’s spring training camp in Oregon, and he convinced his brother to come, too. They decided they wanted to make a sports documentary, the kind that they love to watch, and somewhat impulsively went all-in on the idea by spending their life savings on cinema-quality cameras.
“There was certainly some doubt from people around me, like friends and parents,” Brinkema said. “We had no idea in the beginning what it would become, but we just knew that this was an opportunity that we felt we had been waiting for.”
The camp was notable for its “awesome vibes all around,” he said, with 30 of the best cross-country skiers in the country training together in the spring sunshine. Although some were initially wary of having the Brinkema brothers following them with their cameras, it didn’t take long for that wariness to quickly disappear.
“When Torsten and Lars Brinkema first came to our national team camp in Bend, Oregon, they fit right in with the team,” Diggins said. “I didn’t know them well, but their excitement in showing this sport that we all love so much to the world was infectious.”
An increased sense of urgency
Diggins and the rest of the team invited the Brinkema brothers to travel with them over the course of the next winter to document their World Cup season.
“This was something we had never allowed before, and frankly, no one else had ever asked,” the skier said. “It was mutual belief and trust in seeing the good in each other.”
Brinkema urged his brother, a film school sophomore, to postpone his education in order to travel with the ski team and pursue their goal of making a movie. Their parents weren’t crazy about the plan. But it felt like a calling, and when Diggins asked them to come film at her home in Vermont that summer, they eagerly said yes.
It didn’t take long to realize that Diggins, who was comfortable in front of the camera, would become the star of their ski documentary. And when she told them that she had relapsed back into her eating disorder, the film had a new gravitational center and increased sense of urgency. The skier had previously publicly disclosed, and even written a book about, her earlier struggles with disordered eating and bulimia. It was part of her story—the challenge she had overcome on the road to becoming an Olympic champion.
But while eating disorders can be treated successfully, slips, backslides, and relapses tend to be the rule rather than the exception. The brothers realized the importance of reflecting the entirety of Diggins’s story.
“We just wanted to be there for every moment. We knew that this had the potential of being a really powerful human mental health story,” Brinkema said. “The film covers some really high highs and really low lows through the season as she’s traveling, and struggling, and feeling isolated. And then regaining a source of joy and comfort as she starts to recover while she’s racing. It was an amazing journey.”
The Brinkema brothers are looking forward to the next phase of that journey this winter, when their movie should debut just before the worldwide celebration of sport, triumph, and humanity that is the Winter Olympics.
