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PREDAZZO, ITALY — Johannes Høsflot Klæbo is, almost without question, the greatest cross-country skier who’s ever lived.
The Norwegian athlete has won gold in eight consecutive championship races spread across two seasons — including the first two events at this year’s Olympics, in Italy. It’s quite possible he could walk away from the Games with gold in all six events.
His biggest threat comes from a guy who’s been a cross-country skier for less than three months.
Norwegian Einar Hedegart has beaten Klæbo all three times they’ve raced each other this winter. He’s won five of the six cross-country events he’s entered since the season began in November.
Johannes Høsflot Klæbo celebrates a gold medal at the Olympics in Italy. (Davide Barbieri/NordicFocus)
November is when, at least according to Hedegart, he finally accepted the label of cross-country skier. Before that, he’d still been, at least partially, a biathlete — the Olympic discipline that combines cross-country skiing with precision shooting.
In biathlon, Hedegart was a fast skier, but not always a reliable shooter. Last season, he jumped into a World Cup race against cross-country skiing’s best competitors, and finished a surprising second place.
That result set off a chain of events that have led him to Italy on Norway’s Olympic cross-country team, with a specific focus on the 10-kilometer freestyle event. That’s where, on Friday, he’s expected to challenge Klæbo for Olympic gold.
“We’re looking forward to Friday,” Emil Hosøy, the coach of Hedegart’s club team in Norway, said in a phone interview this week. “It will be a hard competition.”
In a brief interview Tuesday after training with a teammate at the Olympic venue in the Dolomites, Hedegart said he’s prepared for the showdown.
“Everything has gone according to plan,” he said.
Biathlon vs. cross-country
Hedegart’s meteoric rise has enlivened a long-running, colorful debate between cross-country skiers and biathletes over which discipline is superior, and who’s faster. Biathletes have periodically crossed over and notched competitive results, though it doesn’t happen often.
Swedish cross-country star William Poromaa sparked a furor in Scandinavia two years ago by joking that biathlon, with its stops for target shooting, was for athletes who need a rest between ski sessions.
Hedegart is the latest test case — showing that on today’s racing circuits, elite biathletes can be, at a minimum, competitive with the best cross-country skiers.
“I think a lot of cross-country skiers underestimate the level biathlon is at, and the amount of training we are doing,” Hedegart told two cross-country Olympians on their podcast, Skirious Problems. “You guys have to give us some credit, please.”
Hedegart, 24, is from a little north of Trondheim, a city in central Norway that’s produced some of the world’s best cross-country skiers, including Klæbo.
As a kid, he watched cross-country skiing on television, because the Norwegian superstar Petter Northug Jr. came from his area. But Hedegart’s focus was biathlon, and he showed promise early — winning medals at the World Junior Championships and, in 2023, reaching the top 30 in the World Cup, the sport’s highest level of competition.
Hedegart would also, from time to time, enter elite cross-country races. Some of those decisions were happenstance — one because he didn’t have a partner for a biathlon relay on the same day, and another that he entered on a whim after a registration deadline.
But in both of those cases, he won.
His results earned him an entry into a cross-country World Cup race in Oslo last year, where he placed second — prompting questions from Scandinavian pundits about whether Hedegart was focused on the right sport.
So, over the summer, Hedegart hedged his bets: He switched from training with biathlon teams to training with a cross-country ski team — albeit one that would allow him to keep shooting his rifle and compete in biathlon.
“All the way from May to November, I was 50-50,” Hedegart said. “I brought my gun to every camp and shot a lot.”
At the start of this winter, Hedegart entered two sets of races over two weekends — biathlon and cross-country — to help decide how he would spend the rest of the season.
In biathlon, he shot poorly. In one race, he missed eight of 20 shots; only one athlete out of 59 competitors missed more.
The cross-country race, meanwhile, he won by a big margin — besting not just Norway’s top skiers but other top talents from France and Austria. That was the day things changed, Hedegart said.
“I’m a cross-country skier this winter season,” he said.
Klæbo, whose championship winning streak is at risk, has taken notice of Hedegart’s rise, which resulted in him being named to Norway’s Olympic cross-country team early in the winter.
“It’s impressive, what he has done,” Klæbo said. “I’m going to try to give him a good match.”
The best skater of all time?
Both Klæbo and Hedegart himself credit Hedegart’s success this season to a unique aspect of his training.
Cross-country skiing, both on the World Cup circuit and at the Olympics, features events in two techniques — the traditional forward striding and poling known as classical, and the side to side pushing called skating.
Biathletes compete only in skating, and Hedegart, this past year, has focused his training almost exclusively on that technique. He hasn’t even bothered to contest classical cross-country competitions this winter.
Hedegart said on the podcast, in November, that he’d spent less than 12 hours practicing classical style in the previous six months — a tiny fraction of the hundreds of hours he’d spent training in total. Top cross-country skiers, meanwhile, typically divide their training close to evenly between the two techniques.
“That is my strength, that I can use more time than anyone else ever has on skating,” said Hedegart in the interview. “I’ve just really done my thing, and that has gotten me this far.”
Hedegart’s training plan has other unconventional elements, including lots of moderately hard sessions and few extra-hard ones, which allows him to spend more time training overall, said Hosøy, his coach. Hedegart is also a “very clever” athlete who’s shown a keen awareness of his own body that’s unusual for someone his age, Hosøy added.
But it’s the added emphasis on skating that’s allowed Hedegart to take the technique “to a new level,” said Pål Golberg, a former top Norwegian skier who’s competed against Hedegart and now is working at the Olympics as an expert TV commentator.
“The training he does is out of this world,” Golberg said. “He can be the best skater the sport has seen — if he wants to do that.”
A postseason dilemma
That’s the question Hedegart will have to answer after this season — and it poses a real dilemma.
Avoiding the classical technique means he can only compete in half of cross-country’s racing schedule. And because his success, so far, has come mostly in distance events, Hedegart has not yet earned a chance to race individual sprint races for the Norwegian team, whose start slots are hotly contested.
As a result, Hedegart has started just six cross-country races this winter — far less than athletes competing in both disciplines.
“If you want to get old in this sport, maybe you have to get to compete more to have the motivation to train as much as he does,” said Hosøy, the coach.
But training and racing in the classical technique would risk the success Hedegart has found after specializing in skating.
“I wouldn’t take the chance,” said Golberg. “If he has this skating that’s so good, why would you risk it? He would never win a distance race in classic, I’m pretty sure.”
There’s also the question of whether Hedegart will ultimately return to biathlon — which, he said, would make it pointless to try to improve his classical technique, since it’s not used on the biathlon circuit.
At the start of the season, Hedegart said, he still planned to go back to biathlon next year. Now, he added, he’s pretty sure he’s changed his mind: If he’s offered a spot on Norway’s national cross-country team for next year, he’d take it, at least for one season.
But in 2029, the biathlon World Championships will be held in Oslo — a chance to compete in a marquee event in Hedegart’s home nation. “That is a big, big dream of mine,” he said. “And I really hope that I can compete there.”
“That is the back and forth I have to do,” Hedegart added, referring to the balance between the two sports.
If Hedegart’s success this season has complicated his career planning, it’s at least provided Scandinavians with a compelling new storyline — particularly in men’s cross-country skiing, where some pundits complain that Norwegian dominance is making the sport boring.
“Norwegians are pretty tired of watching one Norwegian fighting with another,” said Golberg. “But now, suddenly, you have two sports clashing together.”
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