By Gavin Kentch
I’m not saying that men’s World Cup team sprints, on non-championship courses, are, shall we say, somewhat predictable affairs, in which the whole pack typically skis together until the final laps and no one has an incentive to tire themselves out early in a presumptively futile attempt to string out the field. [ETA: Ben Ogden, in athlete comments at the bottom of this article, has a great argument for why team sprints are good viewing, actually, so so much for my snark.]
But. If watching the entirety of a 14-minute race is too great a time commitment for you, then you could do worse than to fast-forward to the 12:30 mark on the race clock, and just watch the final 90 seconds.
At 12:30 into the race, one Johannes Høsflot Klæbo is chilling in second position in the lead pack, marking Swiss anchor Valerio Grond, having adroitly moved up a few spots after the Norwegians got slightly caught up in traffic coming through the exchange zone for the final time 45 seconds earlier.
At 12:48, coming into the flat ground and open space of the exchange zone area, Klæbo goes, motoring away smoothly with what Kris Freeman once called the man’s “annoyingly perfect” technique (it was a compliment). The courseside flames shooting up into the dark night sky and the, hopefully, bladeless chainsaws revved by spectators provide a more chaotic background that throws the man’s clinical efficacy into sharp relief.
At 12:55, Klæbo has a bit of a gap, and the race is effectively over. This isn’t just a case of hindsight being 20–20; Klæbo tends not to lose these gaps, and the Norwegian men tend not to lose team sprints.
By 13:18, Klæbo already has a gap of several meters. He approaches the course’s final uphill for the final time and jumpskates it with alacrity. By the top of the small hill his lead has roughly doubled, which is saying something inasmuch as the men immediately behind him — Grond of Switzerland, Edvin Anger of Sweden, and Federico Pellegrino of Italy — are among the best practitioners in the world at this particular skill.
Fifteen seconds later, at 13:33, Klæbo is taking a quick glance behind him coming down the hill, confirming his sense that no pursuer is within reach.
13:58.8, and Klæbo is assuming his familiar pose, arms out to each side as he shuts things down a few meters out and cruises to the line. You’ve heard of the famous Winged Victory of Samothrace? Klæbo is more like Bemusèd Victory, amirite?
Slightly behind, Grond has played the final right-hand curve to perfection, sneaking through on the tightest line to move from fourth up into second. Grond comes out of the turn with more speed than either Anger or Pellegrino and keeps the advantage to the finish, where he crosses in second to give the jubilant home crowd its second Swiss podium in the last half hour (Anja Weber and Nadine Fähndrich were third in the women’s race).
Behind him, Anger and Pellegrino duel to the line. They lunge. It is this close:
Anger’s boots (top of the screen here) are longer. Sweden third, Italy wooden medal. It shows on the results sheet as a gap of 0.02 seconds between the two men. It looks to me to be closer than that.
Anger remains prone on the ground for some time, roughly three meters past the line (far right of photo below). The world awaits The Index’s ruling on this.
Meanwhile, Klæbo stands in the finish zone and looks as if he is contemplating what he will have for dinner that night. Leg-one skier Pål Golberg, who will soon tell a finish-line interviewer that he has never previously finished higher than eighth in Davos, is stoked. The second-place Swiss pairing of Grond and Janik Riebli are legit pumped, celebrating at length. This writeup is clearly bordering on the blasé, but racing is racing, and the home team is very justified in celebrating its strong race here.
The rest of the field streams in close behind. France I (Jules Chappaz and Richard Jouve) is fifth, 2.58 seconds back. France II (Renaud Jay and Rémi Bourdin) is sixth, 3.81 seconds back.
Next come the Americans. USA I, Zanden McMullen on the first leg with Ben Ogden anchoring, is slightly in arrears in seventh, 4.07 seconds back. There is a gap of a few seconds and then USA II, JC Schoonmaker and Kevin Bolger, comes in in eighth, 7.93 seconds back.
“It was a really hard race today,” Klæbo tells a FIS camera crew at the finish, preparatory to explaining how he will have to recover well for tomorrow. I feel like this would be a more accurate statement if you substitute “somewhat” for “really” and “last 90 seconds” for “race,” but also Klæbo has 117 World Cup podiums to his name (so far) and my biggest race win is probably the Race to the Outhouse #2 over a field of like two dozen citizen racers, so what do I know.
Back to the Americans, who are trickling back to their phones and to media availability as I write this. Long night for everyone over there.
“Going into today I was thinking a lot about my last couple team sprints where I exploded pretty early on so my main goal was to hang on as long as possible and then try to rip the last lap,” Schoonmaker wrote to Nordic Insights of his race plan. “I was hoping to keep a good position and try to tag off to Kevin in the front half of the pack each leg. Definitely could’ve done a better job with that as my first couple legs I was skiing a bit further back than I’d like.”
“I really like team sprints,” Schoonmaker said. “Just a super fun event to race in and to watch. They’re hectic and fast and racing with a teammate is always a good time too.”
And as for recovery following a race that started at 6:35 p.m. local time?
“Right now I’m incredibly wired and have very low expectations for sleep tonight,” wrote Schoonmaker at roughly 9 p.m. Davos time. “I’ll probably try to go for a little walk and then just put the feet up and wait around until I feel tired enough to make an attempt at sleeping.”
Any Master athlete who has ever done intensity at an evening practice may sympathize.
“I’m not getting much sleep tonight,” McMullen wrote to Nordic Insights at slightly after 9 p.m. “I tried to minimize the caffeine but sprint racing just wrecked my nervous system and I’ll be tired but not able to fall asleep. Fortunately I’ll be able to sleep in tomorrow as I don’t have the sprint start.”
Turning to the race itself:
“Tonight was really cool!” wrote McMullen. “This was my first team sprint on the WC level, and there was just so much jockeying for positions. The tag zone was absolute chaos, and Ben and I definitely could have been a little cleaner. I think the Norwegian team just had their tags flawless and were always able to either make up positions or hold them. That saves more energy and is just easier.”
He added, “I didn’t have much of a strategy besides trying to stay in the front half of the pack to tag off to Ben in a good position. I wish I had gone harder on my second leg to push the pace and make the pure sprinters hurt a little more. At the end of that leg I had a lot of energy but didn’t have the top speed for the third leg that some of the other sprinters have.”
Updates from the other two Americans, who were indeed wired well into the night:
Here’s Kevin Bolger checking in:
“I wasn’t over the moon with my qualifier — but it’s a step in the right direction — feels like I’m missing some gears for the qualifiers I know I can ski. But it’s heading in the right direction which I’m happy about.
“Team sprint tactics are fun — you get the right 2 guys together and taking down a guy like klaebo is possible. I mean you’ve seen it twice now in the qualifiers — Ben is throwing down — and I think that shows that people are knocking on the door. But everyone wants to be in the front to control the race — and the moment another team does that Johannes doesn’t like it and you see him push to the front to take control. But that after the second tag that’s when shit got real out there. But I think JC and I put together a great ski — no trouble, solid tags! We were both pretty happy but of course we want more and Ben, Zanden, JC and I all know we can easily be higher up — and on that podium. Just getting in more reps and it’ll happen!
“I’m pretty wired [Bolger wrote around 9:30 p.m.] — my roommate Zak is looking to turn off the lights soon — but I’m still buzzing with a few MG of caffeine — but just making sure get in a decent cool down. I’m currently laying in bed with normatecs on. The hardest part is eating — we are at altitude so trying to get as much down as we can before bed is key. But I’ll be giving maja [Dahlqvist] a call soon and she’ll put the hammer down on me and probably say I’m not doing enough 😂
“Massive shout out to the wax crew today giving us some great boards out there today as well!!”
Final word here goes to Ben Ogden, one of the best interviews on the circuit. You can listen to the whole thing above should you wish. Here are some highlights:
— I had asked him about his extremely detailed pre-race strategy… shortly after the qual a still-gasping-for-breath Ogden had told the FIS TV crew, “I’m gonna try to ski fast on the first lap, and then ski fast on the second lap, and then ski really fast on the third lap. So I hope it works.”
“I was kind of joking with my pre-race strategy,” said Ogden after the fact in his audio comments to Nordic Insights, “but that was pretty much what ended up going on. And I think it worked pretty well, you know, I feel like we stayed in contact, which was huge. That doesn’t always happen for Team USA in the team sprint, so I was happy with that. Obviously I was — not obviously, but I was shooting for, me and Zan had the goal of doing better. We were hoping to get on the podium, and I think we checked a lot of the boxes necessary to do that, but we just lacked in a few. But you know, we’ve been talking a lot since the race about how we could have done it better, and so we’re confident and happy with what we learned, but definitely searching for more out there in the final.”
— I had asked him, along with everyone else, about his strategy for winding down after the rare night race. Here’s Ogden, checking in, like the others, on the far side of 9 p.m. (you can reverse-engineer the timing for cooldown and mixed zone interviews and recovery drink and getting back to the hotel and dinner and shower from how long it took folks between crossing the finish line and graciously answering questions: as little as 2.5 hours, which actually feels pretty fast to me).
“Definitely finishing the race at seven or whatever it was is brutal for going to sleep at a reasonable hour, but nice thing is we don’t have an early race tomorrow. So I’ve had a bunch of tea, and I’m just kind of working on things on my laptop, and going to start reading my book in a few minutes here, and hope I can fall asleep pretty quick, but it might be one of those nights.”
— Finally, this entire race writeup was a little blasé about team sprints being a relatively predictable affair. Does the man who raced in it, and is nothing if not boring, have a stronger case to make for the team sprint as a good addition to the World Cup calendar?
Reader, he does:
“I think the team sprint is an awesome race. I mean, I get why they don’t have World Cup points, and it therefore causes a lot of people to not want to race, but I mean, we had a fiercely competitive field out there. … It’s one of my favorite races, so I think there should be way more of them.
“I think it’s also one of the best races to watch.
“You know, if you’re a fan from the U.S. and you want to see your people racing, there’s no better race for it than the team sprint, right?
“Because if you watch a sprint, it’s like, ‘All right, qualifier, that’s boring.’
“And then you watch the heats, and they may get out in the quarters, and it’s like, ‘All right, what did I just get all excited for?’
“But the team sprint, you really get a lot of action, so I think it’s great. I think FIS should do more of it.”
There are indeed two more team sprints scheduled on this year’s World Cup calendar, a classic sprint in Cogne on January 31 and a skate sprint in Lahti on March 22 as part of World Cup Finals. The Cogne edition will be a preview of the team sprint at Trondheim; the 2025 World Championships see a classic team sprint on March 5. Not at all hot take, Norway will be favored there, and Klæbo will anchor. That said, there is one person who has set the fastest time in the last two World Cup sprints, and you just finished reading his quotes.
Racing resumes tomorrow with a skate sprint. The qual for that doesn’t start till 2:45 p.m. local time, heats going off at 5:15 p.m., reflecting this evening’s exigencies. Schoonmaker, Bolger, Michael Earnhart, Zak Ketterson, Ben Ogden, Gus Schumacher, and Jack Young are slated to start for the American men.
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American nordic skiing. Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in years one and two of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year three 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, last season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
