By Gavin Kentch
CANMORE NORDIC CENTRE, Canmore, Alberta — Even Johannes Høsflot Klæbo has his weaknesses, but they’re not fatal ones.
“For sure I’ve been kind of nervous before this race,” said Klæbo after yet another classic sprint victory. “I don’t like these kind of finishes to be honest. It’s a long part with doublepoling.”
While Klæbo politely declined another reporter’s persistent attempts to get him to speak to some of his weaknesses on the record, he did say that long doublepole finishes are “where I have kind of lost of my races. So I guess you don’t need to be really smart to understand that. But I will continue to work on that. … The same with Oberhof, and I think those will be the two only really long ones. But again I was able to do it well today, and that’s really good for the confidence as well.”
Here’s what a self-identified growth area looks like for the greatest sprinter of all time: Klæbo first, again, in Tuesday’s classic sprint final that capped off four days’ worth of racing here in Canmore.
Richard Jouve of France was second, 0.47 seconds back, after pushing Klæbo throughout the finishing stretch; this was decidedly not a race where Klæbo’s victory was apparent from 100 metres out and he could start to unstrap his poles at his leisure.
And Erik Valnes of Norway was third, 0.61 seconds back, giving him his second podium-finisher cowboy hat of the long weekend.
The finish of the race is embedded above. Given the largely tactical nature of this Canmore sprint course — it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that, so long as an athlete is in contact-ish with the leaders, the race doesn’t really start until the approach to the final downhill curve under the bridge — you’re not missing all that much with the Instagram-friendly video length.
As the video shows, Klæbo leads into the final downhill, which is canonically what you do not want to do on this course, but he made it work on Saturday in the skate sprint, so there you have it.
Jouve jockeys for position to keep the draft he wants. Klæbo leads out the sprint; Jouve moves out to his left in what the British Eurosport announcer terms a “cheeky move”; both men doublepole for all they are worth. Jouve is ahead until well into the finish stretch, before Klæbo finally comes past him for a solid win. Valnes finishes strong to almost catch Jouve for second.
“For me it was really good to get revenge today,” said Klæbo, after losing a very similar doublepole drag race to Pål Golberg to close out Sunday’s distance race.
“I didn’t want to lose this race,” Klæbo said. “So at the last 75 metres I was like, Oh shit I need to do things right here because I’m not letting this happen one more time.”
Reader, he did not let it happen one more time.
Klæbo’s record in classic sprints borders on the obscene: He has been in 27 World Cup classic sprints in his career, and has been on the podium in 24 of them.
This means that he has been off the podium in a classic sprint only three times in his entire career. Two of them were way back in 2016, in the first and third classic sprints of his career (he won his second career classic sprint). The third was in Oberhof last month (in, not to make excuses, his recent return from the flu that made him skip the Tour de Ski). Klæbo did not disagree with a reporter’s suggestion that today was an important race for him, given his up-and-down season, by his standards, and his poor showing, by his standards, in Oberhof recently.
Is it fun to win almost every classic sprint ever or does it put pressure on you, I asked a man who holds records for most career sprint globes, career sprint victories, single-season sprint victories, and sprint podiums (this is only a partial listing).
“For sure it’s fun to win,” Klæbo admitted. “But I feel like it’s for sure pressure. I always feel like I get nervous. And I mean in Oberhof I was kind of, I don’t know, I think it was the worst race I’ve done in five years or something. And that’s kind of the only thing people write about, especially in Norway, so that was like, okay, kind of gives you a reality check.”
All that said, Klæbo acknowledged that to perform well in sport you need both the right mindset and the right body, and that he has been “really lucky to have a body that has been working well for years. And even though this year has been a little bit more up and down, I still feel like I have done a good job during summer and the fall. And I mean the pressure is there but it’s a part of the game as well I think.”
What do you wish they would write about in Norway instead, I could not resist asking as a follow-up.
“I don’t know,” said Klæbo, “but I guess it’s just how it is. In Norway … we have been writing about Petter Northug winning in Norwegian Cup. … Cross-country skiing in Norway is quite important and huge, and they always write about it even if it’s good news or bad news.”
Klæbo did not deny that there was some part of him that was jealous of the Americans who can toil in obscurity a little more, but also noted an obligation to develop the sport and “broadcast it in the best possible way,” as well as the athletes’ desire to have as many spectators at the races as possible.
The spectator with the best view of Klæbo’s win today, for not the first time, was one Richard Jouve. I asked him if he likes racing against Klæbo.
“Yes,” said Jouve, “it’s always a pleasure to compete against the best skier in the world. I try every race to beat him, so it’s very difficult.”
Is it frustrating that it is difficult to beat him?
Jouve laughed. “Yes, very.”
Valnes, in third, was not making excuses, but also termed his day to be only “Okay. … I was feeling really exhausted today,” he said. “Not a good day for me, but the performance was overall quite good.” He added, “Those who know me, they can see that I was a tired guy today. … I wasn’t feeling quite fresh, so I didn’t have the powerful doublepoling.”
Valnes attributed the fatigue not to this being the fourth race in five days — “I think three races, I’m fit for that, so that shouldn’t be a problem” — but rather to the simple fact that “it’s been a long season. And I’ve soon raced 30 races this season,” he said, “so I think it’s more of the season and the hard program.”
Onto the Americans. There were a full dozen of them in today’s race, though Ben Ogden was not among them; he was a late scratch due to feeling under the weather.
Of the athletes who did race, one-third of them made the heats. JC Schoonmaker advanced to the semifinals, finishing a very close fourth there and ending the day in seventh overall. Zak Ketterson, 18th overall; Gus Schumacher, 20th overall; and Luke Jager, 24th overall, all advanced to the quarterfinals, but ultimately no farther.
Behind them, Zanden McMullen was 33rd in qualifying, Kevin Bolger 35th, Michael Earnhart 42nd, Murphy Kimball 49th, Will Koch 50th, Logan Diekmann 52nd, Jack Young 56th, and Graham Houtsma 58th. Houtsma likely had the best showing today of anyone who did not know he was racing until 11 p.m. last night; that’s when Houtsma was awoken by a coach’s knock on his door and informed that Ogden would not be starting today.
“It was pretty solid,” said Schoonmaker of his race. “I wasn’t super happy with how I was skiing, honestly. … I didn’t feel like I was striding or climbing pretty well. But I’m happy to get a solid result despite that; I got a little luck with lucky loser” in the quarterfinal.
Schoonmaker had spent more of his first heat than you might expect farther off the back than you might expect. He eventually caught back up to finish a close third, grabbing a lucky loser spot by 0.16 seconds, but the outcome was in doubt for quite some time.
“I was surprised at the pace of our quarterfinal,” Schoonmaker said. “It got taken out pretty hot. And then, I don’t know, I just didn’t feel super strong, honestly, on the climbs today. So in the semi I kind of knew that, and I was like, If I can keep contact, I know I have a strong finish. So in the semifinal I was a bit more ready for it; the quarterfinal was definitely a little bit of a shock to the system.”
Schoonmaker analyzed his day’s racing as, “I like how I finished, not quite how I started. So I’ve got some work to do.”
Ketterson had a surprisingly successful race today, inasmuch as his qualifier was a “near-disaster” after he broke a binding on the first uphill, less than a minute into the race. It “nearly came off the ski,” he recounted, but “luckily was just like sort of hovering, sliding back and forth, and didn’t.” He did not expect to qualify after dealing with this, but was pleasantly surprised to do so.
And after that? “Sort of just a little bit of the story of the last few years in the quarterfinals,” said Ketterson matter-of-factly. (Ketterson raced on the same pair of skis in the heats as in the qual, albeit with, of course, a new and carefully applied binding.) “I’ve never made a semi and I hoped today would be the day. I tried to have a good strategy, but those guys were just too fast on the on the hill.”
And for all of this weekend’s talk of tactics and strategy…?
“Honestly,” Ketterson analyzed, “so much of it is just who is the fastest. Like of course it comes down to a little bit of tactics and stuff like that, but you see with the best guys that they can essentially just pick a 50-metre stretch where they decide to use the speed that nobody else has, and they can go from fifth to first with pretty little effort. So I mean, you can play the, like, tactics game and all of that, but I think at some point if I want to make semis consistently I need to just actually be faster.”
Schumacher celebrated his second career time in the classic sprint heats today, with the first one being, by his accounting, “stage six of the Tour, and there were probably like 45 starters, or 40, and they were distance skiers.” He said that today it was “good to make it in, and definitely fun to feel like I had some good tactics, and enough of a finish sprint to hold fourth there.”
Luke Jager, Gus Schumacher’s longtime friend, gamely came through the mixed zone and spoke with media afterwards.
Jager seemed completely destroyed when he did so. “It was hard,” he said. “I mean, the qualifier was really hard. Because it was like one of the hardest qualifiers that I’ve ever done. It’s really slow, like some of the slowest snow I’ve ever skied in. That made it really hard. You had to fight for every inch.”
In conclusion, Jager’s day was hard.
More broadly, Jager pronounced his overall racing here to have been “super rough.” But, ever gracious, he shouted out the home-ish crowd, and new names on the team doing well, and he clearly meant it.
And speaking of new names… Graham Houtsma was “literally barely awake” at 11 p.m. last night when USST head coach Matt Whitcomb knocked on his door. Whitcomb told him, “Hey, Ben’s not feeling well, do you want to race tomorrow?”
Houtsma assented, notwithstanding that the last sprint he had done was in the Lake Placid SuperTour some time ago. He then turned off the light, re-set his alarm for 6 a.m. the next morning, and tried to go to sleep.
Time passed. More time passed. Houtsma’s thought process at this moment was, quite understandably, “Oh my God, I’m racing tomorrow. I’m racing a sprint. That’s unreal.”
Around midnight, sleep finally came. The next morning, Houtsma was preparing to make his World Cup sleep debut. Off of six hours’ sleep. And a recent training block composed almost entirely of long, sustained, easy threshold sessions.
Houtsma got to the venue and warmed up. Everyone stared at him because he was a 20-something American athlete wearing bib no. 8 who was not Ben Ogden.
At 9:36 a.m., Houtsma pushed through the starting wands and headed up the back-to-back 17- and 19-metre climbs that start off the Canmore sprint course. Three minutes, seven seconds, and fourteen-hundredths of a second later he had a completed World Cup sprint start to his name. He was perhaps some distance from qualifying. He was also not last, was not on the reverse podium, and also last season I had USSS sprint points of 578 (lol) so who am I to talk, anyway.
So was making a World Cup sprint debut in this manner — scant sleep, scant sprint training, scant notice — worth it?
“Oh hell yeah, it was worth it,” Houtsma said, brooking little ambiguity here. “It’s always worth it to race.”
— Gerry Furseth contributed reporting
There are more reporters at these races than in Soldier Hollow for U.S. Nationals, but not that many, and I am probably the only one reliant on a GoFundMe to get here. Travel for in-person reporting is not cheap, and travel to anywhere from Alaska is particularly not cheap.
Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in year one of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year two of Nordic Insights for you to be reading now: I was okay with working for very little money to get this love letter to American cross-country skiing off the ground, but I didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing so. If you would like to support what remains a brutally shoestring operation, this season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
