From the FasterSkier archive — posts syndicated from athletes’ and coaches’ own blogs between 2004 and 2012, kept online as published. Current coverage is at fasterskier.com.
Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo (NOR), Emil Iversen (NOR), and Martin Loewstroem Nyenget (NOR), (l-r) during the final kilometers of the Olympic 50 k classic. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
A review of a recently published paper from Norway, “Long-term development culture for sustainable Olympic success: Lessons learned from Norwegian cross-country skiing” by Jacob Walther and Øyvind Sandbakk, is worth the time.
We’ve all heard enough about Norway. But this one simply cuts through some misconceptions, and it is worth the time to review. It strips away the mythology and gets back to what actually drives development and ultimately elite performance. Norway isn’t operating with better information. They’re more disciplined about applying what most programs already understand, and more consistent about what they refuse to do.
The paper addresses this immediately and directly. There is no “Norwegian method.” No magic interval session. No secret intensity zone you can implement and expect results. What they have is a system. And more importantly, a system built around their culture.
We tend to frame their success in physiological and technical terms. It’s not physiology, technique, health management, or mental health; they are all part of it, but they don’t explain the system. Most programs know early specialization is risky and inaccurate. Most coaches understand long-term development and the need to build training slowly and in phases based on training age. The difference is that Norway holds the line on it.
The elements are not new. Delay early selection. Encourage multi-sport participation, and integrate sport science into daily coaching. Invest in coach education. Treat athlete health as part of development, not something that gets in the way of it. The result isn’t just better elite athletes. It’s broader mass participation, more informed training, and a deeper pool of athletes and families engaged in the sport.
Norway’s Johannes Høsflot Klæbo won his first World Cup at 20, in the men’s 1.6 k freestyle sprint in Otepää, Estonia, in 2017. (Photo: Fischer/NordicFocus)
The paper uses Johannes Høstflot Klæbo as a case study. At 15, he placed 101st at junior nationals. Years later, he’s the most decorated Winter Olympian of all time. That’s a compelling outcome. But the value isn’t the result. It’s what the system expects and allows.
In most programs, that athlete gets filtered out early. In Norway, they stay in longer. That’s the point. This isn’t about identifying talent earlier and directing resources and opportunities at those. It’s about not eliminating talent identification too soon. That requires patience, cooperation among club programs, trust in the system, and a willingness to ignore short-term validation.
That’s where the Norwegian model sets itself apart. The turning point came in the lead-up to the 1994 Winter Olympics. Norway didn’t discover new physiology or invent new training methods. They organized themselves differently. They centralized expertise, embedded sport science into coaching, collected experience and training data across all Olympic Sports, and aligned the ski federation from the national team down to the club level.
Olympiatoppen sits at the center, not as a lab removed from the field, but as part of the training process. It doesn’t drive the system, but it informs and shapes it. That balance matters. Norway didn’t just add sports scientists. They used sports science to improve coaching. At higher levels, many coaches are trained in exercise physiology. That reduces misinterpretation and creates consistency over time.
Long-term development in Norway isn’t a slogan. It is intentionally implemented. It follows physiology. Peak endurance performance arrives in the late 20s, after years of consistent training. They don’t challenge that reality; they built their whole system around that reality.
You see that athletes stay in the sport longer, as evidenced by high-level FIS races in Norway. Hundreds of skiers are over 25-30 years old. They build general capacity before narrowing focus. Skill development has time and the room to engrain. Training isn’t rushed. Volume and intensity progress over years, not seasons. Junior results are not used as a sorting mechanism.
And this is where most systems break down. They say development matters, so select early and train accordingly. In Norway, youth championships are not selection events. They are part of the development process. The culture reinforces it. Clubs and schools coordinate so athletes can participate in multiple sports. Athletes regularly move across multiple ski disciplines. The recruitment base stays broad, and the system stays resilient.
Norway hasn’t eliminated selection; they’ve delayed it and minimized its consequences. That distinction matters. What gets labeled as “talent” at 14–16 is often early maturation, better support, or more exposure, not long-term potential. Norway avoids that trap by not falling into it. While many other systems double down on it.
Another principle sits underneath all of this: athlete health, physical and mental, comes before results. Training is managed for long-term progression. Training loads increase gradually over the years. High intensity is controlled, and low intensity dominates most of the training. The goal is adaptation over time, not accumulation in the short term.
The paper also points to emerging pressure on this model. Rising costs, shifting societal trends, increasing early specialization, and changes in team structures all push against it. These aren’t theoretical concerns. There are real pressures that can erode the system if they’re not managed.
Harald Oestberg Amundsen (NOR), Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo (NOR), and Einar Hedegart (NOR), (l-r) share the 20 k Freestyle Mass Start podium at the final World Cup in Lake Placid (USA) to end the 2025/2026 season. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
So what carries over?
We can’t copy Norway. That misses the point. The lesson is alignment. Align incentives with long-term outcomes. Integrate sports science into coaching to improve the coach’s work. Build systems that allow athletes time to develop. And hold the line when short-term pressure starts to dictate decisions.
Many countries can point to a standout athlete. But if success depends on outliers, unusual resilience, unusual support, unusual talent, you don’t have a system. You have anecdotes. Norway produces depth, that is, the expectation and the standard.
There’s no secret session here. What they’ve built is a system that connects coaching and science, commits to long-term development, creates space for late progression, and maintains consistency over time. Not what they’re doing this week or next week, but what the athletes are doing ten years from now.
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Reporter Nat Herz bonds with Nazgul, the infamous Olympic wolfdog. (Courtesy Alice Varesco)
Ciao a tutti!
Greetings from Torino, where this fatigued Olympics correspondent has retreated to recover through bike rides and repeated doses of pizza with family.
I had the chance to attend the closing ceremonies — mostly as a spectator — in Verona on my trip down from the mountains. After more than a dozen Olympic features, not to mention podcasts and race coverage, I’m now about to unplug for a couple of weeks.
But first, I couldn’t resist one last quick post: a roundup, in abbreviated, Reader’s Digest form, of some of the stories that were still on my list as the Olympics ended.
That’s below. In the meantime, I wanted to reiterate my gratitude to the many readers, fans and news organizations who stepped up to support my on-site Olympic coverage. The money you provided was enough to make a real difference in what I was able to do, and gives me the confidence that there’s the support to do this again in the future.
While the past few weeks were a lot of work, it was also an enormous, ravioli-filled privilege and pleasure — one where I made new friends, drank innumerable espresso macchiatos and got to cross-country ski downhill to the “office” every morning.
As I told a friend yesterday: If anyone ever offers you an assignment in Italy, take it.
With that, and with these brief items, we’ll see you next year. Or maybe, in Lake Placid.
American road warrior ski techs grind on
If you thought the work stopped once the Olympic torch flame was extinguished, think again.
That’s definitely not the case for the indefatigable crews that do the work of waxing, cleaning and tuning skis for Olympic cross-country teams.
Top teams, including the U.S., each have their own massive semi truck that they use as a mobile work quarters while traveling all winter around the European World Cup circuit. Those trucks were all in northern Italy for the Olympics — until the last race ended Sunday afternoon.
Soon afterward, the American truck — named Yolanda, after a character in the cult classic film Pulp Fiction — pulled out of the Olympic venue in Lago di Tesero. Or, at least, it tried to: With the warm weather, the truck got stuck in the mud, and required a tractor from organizers to pull it out, said Chris Hecker, one of the U.S. team’s service crew.
U.S. Ski Team service staff member Tim Baucom at the wheel behind one of the squad’s trucks, and at the table on the crew’s Italy-to-Sweden road trip after the Olympics. (Courtesy Chris Hecker)
After a four-hour drive Sunday through the Dolomites, Yolanda and its three staff members rendezvoused with a secondary truck driven by two other ski service technicians in Munich. A six-hour drive on Monday took them to an overnight ferry from northern Germany to Sweden — which would be followed by a nine-hour drive to the Swedish community of Falun, where the World Cup circuit resumes this coming weekend.
The distance, according to Hecker, adds up to 1,100 miles.
One key pit stop was a McDonald’s in a mountain pass leaving Northern Italy known for its beautiful view.
The trucks were also well-stocked by the U.S. team’s nutritionist, Hecker said: sandwiches, water, gummies, chips, Red Bull and cookies.
“All the important things a tech needs to keep driving throughout the day,” he added.
A diminished Chinese team
The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing were marked by an enormous investment by the Chinese government in training and building up the nation’s cross-country ski team.
Well before the Beijing Games, China hired a huge number of veteran European coaches and support staff that included retired Olympic athletes like Russia’s Nikita Kriukov and Norway’s Terje Langli. The country also spent freely on equipment and even built an indoor ski tunnel for summer training.
This time around? China’s Olympic cross-country ski team was a shadow of its former self, with just a single coach in Italy. Wang Qiang, who during the 2022 Olympic season became the first-ever Chinese athlete to stand on the podium in an elite-level World Cup race, placed 37th in his best event, the sprint, at this year’s Games.
Meanwhile, the government has asserted “serious violations of discipline and law” by Zhang Bei, the bureaucrat who led the cross-country ski team effort at the last Olympics, and Chinese news sources report that she’s been “taken away” by police amid an investigation for “suspected economic crimes.”
Meanwhile, Gou Zhongwen, the Chinese sports minister who’d prioritized government investment in cross-country skiing, has been purged from power. In 2024, the government placed Gou — the former chair of the Chinese Olympic Committee and of the 2022 Winter Olympics organizing committee — under investigation, then expelled him from the party.
China’s former sports minister, Gou Zhongwen, stands during court proceedings in this photo published by the Chinese government.
In December, he was sentenced for taking what the government said was more than $30 million in bribes, among other alleged transgressions. Gou’s official sanction was the death penalty, though it comes with a two-year reprieve, and experts say such a sentence is typically converted to life in prison.
A spokesperson at the U.S.-based Chinese embassy said in an email last week that the country has “consistently placed high importance on the development of winter sports.”
“Chinese cross-country skiing and biathlon have achieved and will continue achieving significant progress,” the spokesperson said.
Klaebo’s post-Olympics: a return to World Cup, chicken wings and a trip to America
Norwegian Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, the winningest winter Olympian in history after sweeping six golds in this year’s games, says he plans to compete at the season-ending World Cup races in Lake Placid, New York.
At a news conference Saturday after winning his last event, the 50-kilometer classic race, Klæbo said he needs a “couple of weeks, now, to really recover,” but after that it’s his goal to participate in March in Lake Placid — only the second weekend of World Cup racing in the United States in more than two decades.
“My personal opinion is that we should have a World Cup event (in the U.S.) every single year, but I’m not in charge,” Klæbo said. “I think we are all looking forward for Lake Placid. I think it’s going to be a fun weekend to finish up this amazing season.”
Klæbo is also on the Norwegian team for this upcoming weekend’s World Cup races in Sweden.
But he did let himself indulge, at least briefly, in a break from his notoriously fastidious diet following the Olympic closing ceremonies in Verona, where he acted as Norway’s flag bearer.
Johannes Høsflot Klæbo orders chicken wings at a McDonald’s after the Olympic closing ceremonies in Italy. (Pien Huang/NPR, used with permission)
Afterwards, an NPR reporter, Pien Huang, spotted Klæbo and some teammates “putting in a big order for chicken wings” at a local McDonald’s.
In a text message, Klæbo’s father Haakon confirmed Huang’s report, saying his gluten-intolerant son had turned to fast food “when I said I was not able to order gluten-free pizza.”
An Olympic cheese tour
What’s the point of a reporter traveling to Italy if he can’t con his way into a tour of a cheese factory?
Yes, dear reader, after these Olympics, I am not just a ski correspondent. I am also now an expert on a raw milk cheese called Puzzone, which is native to the area, Val di Fiemme, that hosted the Olympic cross-country ski races.
The backstory: One morning at the competition venue, I was having a chat with an Italian ski industry professional, whom I was told was from the town of Asiago. Ah, I said, you guys have some good cheese. Yes, the guy responded, I’m not really a cheese guy, but here in Val di Fiemme, you should really try the local delicacy called Puzzone — an Italian word that translates roughly to “stinker.”
This being a busy assignment at the Olympics, I filed this fact into the corner of my brain where stories go to die.
A day later, though, I was taking a walk from my apartment to a nearby cross-country ski trail when I stopped dead: There was a sign on the side of the road that said: Puzzone di Moena. (Moena is a nearby village.) It was next to a nondescript building that, upon further inspection, contained a cheese shop and a workspace that looked to me like a cheesemaking area.
I tasted some Puzzone in the store — it was sharp and pungent, especially the more aged varieties — then left with a chunk that I shaved onto eggs and toast. But feeling a little unresolved, the next time I passed the building, I knocked on the door to the workspace, and asked if I could check it out.
Which was how, a few days later, I ended up exchanging some messages with the “boss” — Andrea Morandini, the son of one of the farmers in the local cheese coop. He told me, in his Italian accent, to meet him the next morning at “da place.” I did, where he walked me through the history and current status of Puzzone — which, he said, acquired its name when an agricultural expert, on a national radio program in 1974, was tasting and describing area cheeses.
The inside of the Puzzone cheese factory in Predazzo. (Nathaniel Herz/FasterSkier)
“They are trying and smelling it — the one from Cavalese, the one from Predazzo. And when they are speaking about the one from Moena…they say, ‘Wow, it’s strano (strange), this is Puzzone,’” said Morandini. “So, it’s born live.”
Puzzone, Morandini told me, had its roots in Val di Fiemme’s agrarian history, when families would keep a cow or two and trade milk to local dairies in exchange for a share of the cheese produced. In a diet that otherwise depended on potatoes and polenta, cheese was a welcome addition of flavor, Morandini said.
The particularly stinky character of Puzzone is because it’s what’s known as a “washed rind” cheese — with its rind brushed regularly with salty water that encourages the growth of bacteria.
After my history lesson, Morandini took me backstage. What I thought was a workroom was actually a dressing room, where I donned a hairnet, slippers and vest; we then walked through a cavernous industrial space with vats and tanks, where cheese had been made earlier that morning.
Down a flight of stairs, we found the racks where wheel upon wheel of cheese is stored. In the deepest, darkest room, I hit a wall of ammoniac haze that made my eyes water and my lungs tickle.
The cooperative, Morandini told me, includes 11 farmers, most of whom own some 50 cows each. In the winter, the cows stay close to home, but in the summer, they’re sent outside to feast on grass, which gives the cheese made in that season a special flavor, according to Morandini.
One full wheel of aged Puzzone, a foot or so across, will set you back about 300 euros, or some $350. A wheel of younger cheese goes for some 170 euros, Morandini said. Some 70% of the factory’s production is consumed in the region, while a portion of it goes to customers in the United Kingdom and France, he added.
Andrea Morandini points to a wheel of Puzzone cheese that’s aging on a rack in the factory basement. (Nathaniel Herz/FasterSkier)
In a subsequent taste test I conducted with U.S. Olympic silver medalist cross-country skier Ben Ogden — a Vermonter who grew up eating raw milk cheese — Ogden described the young Puzzone as a solid “daily driver” cheese he could eat on the regular.
The aged stuff?
“Oh, God, that has got a taste,” Ogden said. “Holy crap.”
He added: “There are acquired tastes out there. And this is not one that I’ve acquired; it tastes like compost, a little bit.” “I’m sorry,” he said. “I hope the Italians don’t listen to this.”
Schumacher eyes medal celebrations — and maybe some free drinks
Anchorage’s Gus Schumacher, who last week became only the third ever American man to win an Olympic medal in cross-country skiing, says he’s looking forward to sharing his silver hardware with the next generation of U.S. athletes when he arrives back in Alaska.
“I’ll do whatever anyone asks me to do — but I’m excited to get some wear and tear on that thing,” Schumacher said in an interview a few days after his medal, which he earned with his podium finish in the team sprint with Ogden. “Not that I’ve not been a role model at home, but to have that carry a little more weight is pretty exciting.”
Schumacher, who grew up inspired by Alaska Olympic gold winner Kikkan Randall, said he’s seen how beat up and worn her medal is, along with those won by Jessie Diggins, the star American skier from Minnesota, “and I think that’s the coolest thing ever,” he added.
“I’m really glad they make them heavy — it could be lead in there for all I care,” said Schumacher, 25. “But you feel the weight when you touch it. And I think for people to be able to see it in person is cool.”
Gus Schumacher, left, and Ben Ogden show their silver medals after the Olympic team sprint. (Davide Barbieri/NordicFocus)
Schumacher will also race in Lake Placid before finishing his season, and it’s possible he could take a vacation in Central America after that. But he also likes being home, he said.
His life hasn’t changed much, Schumacher added, and even if a big sponsor showed up at his doorstep, he might still turn it down if it required too much work. He makes enough money from prize money and ski sponsorship, he said, to cover his expenses — especially since he still lives at home with his mom.
One thing he will be accepting: An offer of free water or beers at Creekbend, a popular concert venue in the community of Hope, outside Anchorage, that Schumacher has visited occasionally.
“I’ll definitely be cashing that one in,” he said, adding: “If I’m really milking the whole medal thing, I probably won’t have to pay for a ton of beers this spring.”
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FasterSkier will have our own Nat Herz on the ground at the Olympics, which, to be honest, is a very big financial lift for us. If you value the thoughtful work and access FasterSkier provides at championships like this one, please consider becoming a Voluntary Subscriber. Your support directly fuels the work we do to cover the people, places, and moments that make our sport special.
