What do Jessie Diggins and Ron DeSantis have in common? Maybe more than you think.

The Iowa caucuses were this week, and on this episode of the hit New York Times podcast The Daily, we have a recap of the results with our distinguished political correspondent, Reid Epstein.

Wait, sorry, we got confused. This is still a cross-country skiing podcast. But this is, in fact, the crossover skiing-politics content you've been waiting for. Epstein, a new friend of the pod who really is a political correspondent for the New York Times, interviewed Jessie Diggins a few days ago to get her perspective on finishing second place when it's really gosh darn cold — which, apparently, is an appropriate analogy for the big story from this year's Republican Iowa caucuses. So, since we couldn't get Diggins on the podcast this week, we thought it would be fun to hear from Epstein, instead.

If you hate this, or hate us now, we're sorry, but we actually think this was pretty fun. We're posting a mailbag episode at the same time for those of you who want vanilla ski racing content. Send us your hate mail, race predictions (World Cup or GOP primary) and feedback at devon@fasterskier.com and nat@fasterskier.com.