Tag: Erik Valnes

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Johannes Høsflot Klaebo’s 100th World Cup win did not arrive with the roar he’d grown used to on this course.

Granåsen last March had been a cauldron—tens of thousands of fans in plastic ponchos, rain pouring sideways, the World Championships turning Trondheim into a temporary capital of the sport. Eight months later, on the first Friday of December, the same stadium felt smaller. The sky was already dim by early afternoon, the floodlights casting a clean, blue-white glare across sugary tracks. The weather had finally cooperated—no rain, firm snow, kick wax that actually bit—but the crowd was thin enough that you could hear individual cowbells and specific voices when the finalists swung into the stadium.

Still, the stakes were anything but small. Norway flooded the start list with a full Nations-Group, 12 men in red suits, all chasing the same thing: an Olympic ticket to Milano–Cortina. Russia’s return to the World Cup had been confirmed in principle earlier in the week, adding long-term uncertainty to an already cutthroat season, but there were no Russian suits on the start line in Trondheim.

And in the middle of it all, on the same course where he’d taken six gold medals at Worlds, Klaebo lined up for a classic sprint with 99 World Cup victories to his name and the chance to round the number off in his own backyard.

By the end of the afternoon, the number would be 100. The route there was messier—and more revealing—than the record book will show.

A qualifier that flipped the script

The first jolt of the day came from the American side of the results sheet.

Ben Ogden, the 25-year-old Vermonter who has been quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) remaking the U.S. men’s sprint profile, didn’t just survive the qualification round—he beat the entire Norwegian armada on their home snow. Ogden set the fastest time of the morning, ahead of Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo in second and a 19-year-old Swede, Alvar Myhlback, in third.

For U.S. head coach Matt Whitcomb, the signal was as much about skis and process as it was about the scoreboard.

Norway had sent out its complete Nations-Group—extra men beyond the regular quota—12 in total, and every one of them qualified for the heats. To outski so many Norwegians in a Norwegian sprint, Whitcomb later pointed out, is not an accident. It takes real form and excellent skis.

Ogden’s own description of the qualifier sounded almost deliberately un-dramatic, as if he were trying to file the moment under “routine” before the day had even finished.

“They all feel the same for me, for the most part,” he said afterward. “I definitely knew I was having a good one, skiing pretty fast, but you never know till you cross the finish line. In the middle of the race, I don’t think about that too much—I just sort of think about the next hurdle… At the bottom of the hill, I think about getting to the top, at the top, I think about pushing hard into the downhill, and on the downhill, I think about skiing the corner at the bottom of the hill well. That’s kind of the way it goes mentally for me. I definitely felt good, felt strong. I just felt like I could push and push and push and still have some energy, so it’s a good feeling for sure.”

Behind him, the margins were tight everywhere. Gus Schumacher and Jack Young both hovered just outside the top 30; Kevin Bolger lurked not far behind.

JC Schoonmaker, representing APU and still the same powerful sprinter who has lived on the brink of significant breakthroughs for several seasons, slid into the heats in 24th.

If Ogden’s run lit the American side of the results board, Myhlback’s qualification told a different kind of story—a long-distance skier breaking into the sprint world by almost ignoring one of its foundational assumptions.

The double-poling kid from Bjursås

On the face of it, a 1.4-kilometer classic sprint in Trondheim is not where you’d expect to see the aftershocks of Vasaloppet.

Myhlback, a 19-year-old Swede from Bjursås, arrived in Trondheim already something of a legend in a different corner of the sport. In March, he had become the youngest winner in the hundred-year history of the Vasaloppet, staving off the best of the Ski Classics field over 90 kilometers of classic racing and double-poling his way under the blue arch in Mora.

His recent résumé reads like a long-distance syllabus: victories at Vasaloppet, the Klarälvsloppet, Alliansloppet, and the Blink Classics roller-ski race, all in the three-hour-plus universe of Ski Classics racing.

Yet in Trondheim, he and the coaches around him made a choice that felt deeply rooted in that marathon background. While almost the entire field stuck to traditional classic setups—grip wax underfoot, long diagonal-stride climbs—Myhlback rolled to the start on skate skis, no kick wax, no plan to stride. His day would be decided on pure upper-body power and glide.

He stuck with that choice all afternoon. In qualification, he was third, just 0.24 seconds behind Klaebo and less than half a second behind Ogden, double-poling up the long climb where others were striding. In the heats, he doubled down, literally: double-poling on skate skis in a classic sprint, in a World Cup final, on a course where the kicks of Norwegian diagonal stride have defined the past decade.

That he advanced at all would have been a story. That he finished the day on his first World Cup podium, sandwiched between Oskar Opstad Vike (second place) and Lars Heggen (fourth place) in a final dominated by Norwegians, turned it into something else.

It also sharpened an old talking point: Norway’s legendary wax trucks versus a kid who effectively opted out of grip wax altogether, trusting that his marathon-honed double-poling engine could hang on a course built for diagonal stride.

The corner that wouldn’t let go

If qualification belonged to Ogden and the chemistry of Norwegian wax trucks, the afternoon’s defining feature was a corner—and the way it kept finding Americans.

Granåsen’s men’s sprint course climbs from the start to a right-hand turn that looks elementary on a map and on television. It’s not an overtly decisive feature: no off-camber sweeping change of direction, no opportunities for bold attacks, just too early on the course to gain a significant advantage. Yet, over and over again, as head coach Matt Whitcomb later put it, “that corner“ has become a problem spot.

In the men’s quarterfinals, Schoonmaker arrived there in a good spot, charging with what Whitcomb described as “gas to burn.“

Then he tangled with Italy’s Simone Mocellini at the top of the climb, went down, and his day ended with a broken pole and a replay that U.S. coaches will be watching for years.

“Today was definitely a step in the right direction,“ Schoonmaker wrote afterward. “It builds some confidence for the next races and for the season. I feel good and feel like I’m skiing pretty well, but it’s just not quite coming together the way I would like. I’m happy with the spot I’m in at the moment.”

In an Olympic year, that kind of tempered optimism reads differently. Under the U.S. selection procedures for Milano–Cortina, an individual top-eight finish in one of the Olympic events—sprint classic, 10 k skate, 20 k skiathlon, 50 k classic—can lock in an athlete’s nomination through objective criteria. For sprinters like Schoonmaker and Ogden, these early-season classics are more than just race days; they’re auditions with permanent consequences.

Ogden’s quarterfinal, by contrast, looked like the blueprint for surviving that fraught middle of the course. He surged early, stretched his heat into a line, and controlled the race in a way that kept him clear of chaos. He won his quarter almost casually, looking like a man who had solved Granåsen’s puzzle.

Then the semifinal brought him back to the same corner.

Ogden selected quarterfinal five—the last men’s heat in the rotation, the one where recovery time before the semifinal is shortest. By the time he lined up again, he could feel the effort in his arms; the plan, he said, was to sit in the pack early and save his move for the big climb.

Instead, the day tightened around a single moment.

“In the semifinal, I was kind of feeling the quarterfinal in my arms a little bit,“ he said. “So I thought, all right, I’ll just sort of sit in the pack here and wait until that big climb and try and do what I do on that. But I kind of paid the price early on, getting tangled up in that corner. I don’t think Harald [Østberg Amundsen] obstructed me or anything of the sort—he just happened to step on my tip. And when that happens, people who have ski raced will know that your ski comes to a stop, and you can’t really move it. And then that kind of caused me to get spun around, and we both went down.”

“Definitely [a] frustrating way to end the day, especially when I was feeling so good. But these things happen. And there’s always tomorrow.”

Whitcomb, who has coached through more sprint generations than most of the field has been alive for, sounded almost exasperated with that stretch of trail.

“This is probably the most competitive sprint we’ll race all year, until Drammen,“ he said, noting that every team—not just Norway—is living with Olympic selection pressure this winter. “For us, that corner is not an important part of the race, but it keeps becoming one… It’s a place where you should be skiing stable, defending your space, not trying to drop into the stadium with maximum speed.“

The Americans, in other words, left Trondheim with film to study as much as with results to celebrate. Ogden’s ninth-place finish—best in the U.S. men’s camp and agonizingly close to that top-eight Olympic criterion—is both a milestone and a marker.

Five Norwegians, one Swede, and a milestone

By the time the men’s final lined up, the race had distilled into a different kind of pressure.

Norway had put five men into the last six: Klaebo, Oskar Opstad Vike, Erik Valnes, Lars Heggen, and Ansgar Evensen. The lone non-Norwegian was Myhlback, the kid on skate skis, bib 3 set alongside four pairs of Fischer classic boards and one more pair of Atomics.

On paper, the stakes were layered. For Klaebo, it was win number 100 and the chance to keep an almost absurd streak alive: seven straight wins in Granåsen sprints, counting Worlds.

For Vike and Evensen—both already rising up the sprint standings—a podium here, in the hardest sprint of the season and on home snow, would strengthen an Olympic case in front of national coaches who did not have unlimited roster spots to hand out. Under IOC rules, each nation can take a maximum of eight men and eight women in cross-country; FIS allows only four athletes per gender per event.

From the gun, it was clear this would not be one of Klaebo’s processions.

Vike drove the pace early, taking the field up the major climb and over the top with a small gap. Heggen, just 20 and already a three-time junior world champion, looked at home in the front half of the pack. Valnes hovered near Klaebo, doing what he has done for seasons now: protecting his status as Norway’s most consistently useful classic sprinter.

Klaebo, for once, did not look invincible on the climb. He came over the top under pressure, with Vike controlling the line, and Myhlback momentarily buried deeper in the pack.

Then, on the descent back into the stadium, the familiar pattern snapped back into place.

Whitcomb described what happened there with a kind of forensic appreciation: “Klaebo’s signature move, popping out of his tuck to give two short, almost invisible pushes, gaining just enough speed to own the entry into the turn.”

From there, the physics feels pre-written: better speed into the corner means better speed out of it, and better speed out of it means that when the straightaway arrives, the race belongs to him.

Vike held on for a second. Behind them, Myhlback produced one last, pulsing double-pole assault, hauling himself from sixth off the final corner past Heggen and Valnes to grab third—the lone white and blue Swedish suit in a sea of red, and his first World Cup podium.

The official result sheet will show a clean column of numbers: Klaebo first in 2:59.89, Vike +0.31, Myhlback +0.34, Heggen, Valnes, and Evensen rounding out the six. The messy part—the decisions that got them there—was already being replayed on screens in wax trucks and team vans before the snow had stopped squeaking.

“Number 100. I’m taking it here.”

When the stadium interviewer finally put a microphone in front of Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo, the question almost wrote itself: had he, as some had suggested, deliberately eased off in last weekend’s distance race in Ruka to engineer his 100th win on home snow?

Klaebo, grinning, swatted the idea away.

“Number 100. I’m taking it here,“ he said. “To take it and to also do it in a sprint—it’s special… I wish I could say that. But no, I didn’t. I just feel like it was a perfect place, and doing this at the start of the weekend is really good. Now we can really just enjoy the weekend and hopefully some more good racing the next couple of days.“

At 29, he is now the first man to reach 100 World Cup wins and only the second athlete overall, joining fellow Norwegian Marit Bjørgen, who finished her career with 114.

Whitcomb, who has been on the circuit for the entirety of Klaebo’s rise, sounded as if he were still trying to convince himself the story was real.

“It almost doesn’t seem like a true story,“ he said. “Given that he won every race at World Championships in his backyard, given that he won his 100th World Cup in his backyard… and yet he does it. And that’s, I guess, the point of this whole thing.“

Today’s win, he noted, was not a walkover. Klaebo was genuinely under pressure on the climb. He had to make the pass on the descent. For an athlete whose dominance can sometimes feel inevitable, that mattered—it turned the milestone into a race rather than a coronation.

Norway’s sprint cauldron—and everyone else inside it

For the Norwegian men’s team, Trondheim’s result sheet reads less like a celebration and more like a spreadsheet.

The host nation deployed its full quota: twelve athletes, all of whom qualified into the top 30.

Seven Norwegians made the semifinals. Five made the final. The internal competition for Olympic places—which Norwegian media routinely describe as more cutthroat than the Games themselves—tightened another notch.

Evensen, who podiumed in Ruka and again came close here, is building what looks suspiciously like a “you can’t leave me home“ dossier. Vike’s second place gives him a marker race in front of home coaches. Heggen, not long removed from the junior ranks, now has “World Cup final in Trondheim“ on his resumé. Valnes remains what he has been for several years: the quiet constant, who makes every relay debate harder.

All of it plays out under the exact challenging numbers that govern every other nation: eight men, eight women total; four start spots per event. In a year when Russia’s gradual reintroduction will eventually change World Cup standings, and when nations like Sweden are suddenly finding new men’s sprint stars in unlikely places, no Norwegian result feels expendable.

For the Americans, the lens is different but just as sharp. U.S. selection procedures put heavy weight on top-eight finishes in events that mirror the Olympic schedule; Ogden’s ninth today falls just outside that automatic tier but lands him firmly in the heart of the conversation as the season unfolds. Schoonmaker’s “step in the right direction,“ as he put it, is also a reminder that sometimes the key line on a selection sheet is not a single result but a trend—of qualification, of speed, of that “look in his eyes“ Whitcomb referenced.

And somewhere beyond the World Cup bubble, Myhlback’s coaches and sponsors in the Ski Classics universe are waking up to a fact they probably already suspected: the kid who won Vasaloppet isn’t only a marathoner. His decision to show up in Trondheim, on skate skis, for a classic sprint, and walk away with a podium is going to complicate every conversation about where he belongs.

A quieter Granåsen, and a long season ahead

As the stadium emptied on Friday evening, Granåsen sounded more like a training venue than a World Championships site: a few kids sliding around on the outrun, the soft hiss of sprinters cooling down, coaches trudging back to wax trucks under a sky already leaning toward night.

Inside those trucks and team rooms, the day’s big moments were already being analyzed into data points. For Klaebo, the milestone win will sit at the top of his personal mythology, another chapter in the story of a hometown kid who has somehow bent the sport around his own arc. For Norwegians like Vike, Evensen, Heggen, and Valnes, the Trondheim sprint will live on as Exhibit A, B, C, and D in Olympic selection debates that will stretch deep into January.

For Ogden and Schoonmaker, the corner that took them down will become homework—grainy replay clips, course maps, and, eventually, new lines in the U.S. sprint “playbook“ the team keeps for every World Cup venue.

And for Alvar Myhlback, who insists he is still a long-distance skier first, Trondheim may end up feeling like an interruption: a single day on a familiar course in Norway when he parked the marathon skis, rolled out on skate boards, and proved that his double-poling engine works just fine in the cramped, chaotic, oxygen-starved world of classic sprinting.

The World Cup moves on quickly—20k skiathlons on Saturday, 10k skate starts on Sunday, Davos and the Tour de Ski looming just ahead. But for one early-winter afternoon in Trondheim, on a course that is beginning to feel like the sport’s central stage, the story belonged to a corner, a kid on skate skis, and a 29-year-old Norwegian who somehow made history again in his own backyard.

 

Complete Results

Trondheim Men’s Classic Sprint RESULTS

Trondheim Men’s Classic Sprint QUALIFYING

 

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