Content note: This film and review deal with eating disorders. If you struggle with an eating disorder, you can get help by calling 877-228-8348.
Punishing your body is par for the course for most professional athletes. But for cross-country skier Jessie Diggins, that punishment went beyond the snow, into some dark places. In their film Threshold, coming to Peacock on February 23, directors Lars and Torsten Brinkema look into both her incredible skiing career, but also her struggles with the eating disorder, bulimia.
Jessie Diggins was born in Minnesota and strapped on skis as a little girl. As she began competing when she got into middle school, her parents and coaches saw that she had a lot of potential. Along with them, Jessie began pushing herself to her absolute limit in order to win races. Even though it was hard on her, she saw results, winning more and more important races, eventually making her way to the 2018 Olympics.
In Threshold, she says this is when things begin to change for her. She has had success up to this point, but no American woman had won a cross-country skiing medal up to that point. Along with her team, they won gold in a team sprint. She explains how she pushed harder than she ever had, despite the pain, and collapsed at the end of the race. But she also began to realize that the body that she was pushing around was no longer as small as it once was, leading her to an eating disorder as she tried to make herself small enough to be faster.
One of the things that the film does well is to show how widespread eating disorders are among elite athletes and to show how one can be outperforming at the highest level, and the next could be dead as a result of the eating disorders. Threshold discusses other athletes who have succumbed to eating disorders, with no one knowing what they were going through.
Jessie began to get her bulimia under control, becoming a spokesperson for the Emily Program. But as they began filming Threshold, she had a relapse following the 2022 Olympics, reshaping the entire film. So while this is no doubt a sports documentary, it also follows a woman actively working to battle her eating disorder. But bringing to light a serious problem, both in the world of sports and the wider public, felt like an important mission both for the Brinkema brothers and for Jessie.
The film does a great job of balancing the two aspects of her life. Sometimes when films start to explore an “issue,” it can turn the subject into that exclusively. Threshold does a good job of allowing Jessie to be more than her eating disorder, while not treating it like nothing. It also includes interviews with her family, her coaches, and her teammates, which helps us to see how it affects people beyond Jessie.
As we sit and enjoy the final days of the 2026 Olympics, including watching Jessie Diggins win yet another medal in cross-country skiing, Threshold reminds us that the stories of these athletes go beyond these three weeks. Some are stronger than we can see on our screens.
Rating: 4/5
Threshold comes to Peacock on February 23.
This review originally appeared in The Dominion Post on February 20, 2026.
As someone who dealt with eating disorders for ~30 years, I think I'll skip this one, but I'm always glad to see films being made about this sort of thing, because it's so prevalent, and so many people either are clueless about it or ignore it when it's happening. It's a difficult issue, and films like this help not only to educate but also to destigmatize, which is great.