By Noah Eckstein
GRANÅSEN ARENA, Trondheim — Tuesday proved that yes, it does in fact still occasionally snow in Norway. But on Wednesday — notwithstanding a few flakes in the morning — Ullr’s more liquid cousin returned to make clear that, right now, rain is still king at this maritime venue.
As predictably as raindrops fall from the sky, the Norwegian men win team sprints. Today was no different as Johannes Høsflot Klæbo and Erik Valnes took a truly dominant victory in front of an adoring crowd. Klæbo remains undefeated at these championships, and the prospect of a clean sweep is becoming more tantalizing (or demoralizing, depending on your rooting interest) by the day.
Finland, riding a big penultimate-leg surge from Ristomatti Hakola and some impressive flexibility from anchor Lauri Vuorinen in the final boot throw, snagged second by a hair. Just on the wrong side of that photo finish was Edvin Anger, but he and partner Oskar Svensson still came away with bronze for Sweden.
The American duo of Gus Schumacher and JC Schoonmaker fought at the front of the lead pack throughout the race, eventually coming home 12.3 seconds back in sixth. And Xavier McKeever and Antoine Cyr, racing for Canada, scored a respectable ninth.
After fiddling with the team sprint qualification format for a number of years, FIS recently settled on a format that has so far pleased athletes and coaches. Rather than putting teams through the processional equivalent of a sprint semifinal, athletes now each lay down a qualifying time individually to start the day; the two times are then combined to determine seeding for the final.
According to Schumacher, this system is an upgrade. “I did one team sprint, I think, in the other format,” he said in the mixed zone after the final. “And, yeah, I prefer this qualifier.”
In the prelim, the Norwegian duo of Valnes and Klæbo unsurprisingly snagged bib 1 by a cumulative 4.04 seconds. Hakola and Vuorinen were second, followed by Frenchmen Jules Chappaz and Richard Jouve in third.
Schumacher and Schoonmaker took bib 8, and McKeever and Cyr nabbed 11th, later reporting that their morning had been a tale of two qualifiers.
Cyr, typically the stronger sprinter, struggled. “This morning was like a big slap in the face,” he reflected in the mixed zone, “because I was really disappointed in how I skied, how I felt.”
McKeever, though, came in clutch to ensure that the Canadians were still among the 15 teams that made the final. “This morning was probably my best qualifier ever at this level,” he said after the fact, still elated. “That was really exciting to pull off.”
Notably, Sweden — pre-race medal favorites who would later justify that pressure with bronze in the final — qualified only 11th after late substitution Svensson struggled with skis in the prelim, shouting some choice obscenities as he crossed the line.
The team sprint was not the only exciting bit of racing on Wednesday. In the gap between the qualifier and the final, para athletes contested the World Championship classic sprint. North Americans raced strongly, with American Jake Adicoff taking silver in the men’s visually impaired category while Natalie Wilkie of Canada and Sydney Peterson of the U.S. took silver and bronze in the women’s standing race.
To editorialize a bit here as a first-time spectator of a para competition: The racing was electric — certainly more suspenseful as to the winners than either of the races that followed — and the nearly full stadium grandstands were raucous and fully invested. It seems like a no-brainer for FIS to try to find a way (like the UCI did with cycling super-World Championships in Glasgow in 2023) to integrate these races more often.
Back to the team sprint: the final was not particularly close. Valnes started pushing the pace from the very first lap, and by the middle of Klæbo’s first outing the Norwegians had already established a near-unbridgeable gap that they proceeded to carry easily to the finish. Try to contain your surprise.
Behind, though, racing was tight. An elite chase group formed about halfway through, containing Finland, the U.S., France, Italy, and Sweden. Canada, Switzerland, and Czechia nearly managed to latch on a few different times, but, after dangling precipitously for a few kilometers, all faded back in the closing laps.
Afterward, Schumacher and Schoonmaker both thought they had battled well through the early stages despite the very hot pace driven by the Norwegian flyer off the front.
“The first lap was honestly pretty sweet,” Schoonmaker said in the mixed zone. “I was feeling pretty good on this one and just felt like I was able to relax pretty well in the pack — just ski up near the front — which is kind of a good change from some of the team sprints I’ve done, where it’s more like fighting back in 10th or 11th place.”
Halfway through the penultimate leg, Hakola of Finland put in an enormous surge and gained a few seconds on the rest of the chasers. Schumacher, sensing an opportunity, ducked inside on the final corner into the stadium and pulled around to lead the group into the tag zone. He handed off to Schoonmaker in third place, 1.5 seconds back from the Finns and 12 behind the Norwegians.
Schoonmaker had some thoughts at this moment.
“I saw Gus coming around the last corner into third” as they approached the final handoff for his anchor leg, Schoonmaker candidly said afterwards, “and I just immediately got super nervous. I was like, oh, fuck, like, Jesus. But it was really cool.”
Schumacher, for his part, was thrilled with how his final push played out. “Jules [Chappaz] just gave me the inside on that last corner,” he said, “and I felt really good about just opening it up then, remembering that that was my sprint finish.”
Hear more: Much more from Gus and JC about their day here:
In the final leg, always a mad scramble, Schoonmaker skied assertively up the first climb, battling with Jouve and Federico Pellegrino of Italy for position. The second climb proved to be just a bit too much, though, and he slowly dropped away from the leaders.
“The other guys just had another gear that I couldn’t really find,” he rued. “So I was proud to just be in the fight for the medal. But it’s definitely a little bittersweet to be so close.”
Vuorinen struggled to maintain the gap Hakola had handed him, and in the end, Finland, Sweden, and Italy came up the finish straight three wide. Vuorinen and Anger lunged desperately across the line, neither with a clear advantage, and Pellegrino trailed just behind. After a minute, photo review showed Vuorinen with the ever-so-slightly better boot throw, although celebrations had already begun in both the Finnish and Swedish camps.
Pellegrino, for the second time these championships, missed out on a medal by a handful of milliseconds. He was visibly frustrated in the mixed zone, a stark departure from his contented nostalgia after his near-miss in the skiathlon, and not just because he had to field yet more questions about the potential participation of Russian athletes.
“It hurts a lot because we were right there,” he said. “Davide [Graz, the Italian scrambler] proved he was ready to get on the podium. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to finish at my best. I wish I could go back and have tried different tactics instead. I waited, I had some energy for the sprint, but I know that the final sprint in classic technique has been my limit for many years and today it was demonstrated again. It’s a shame.”
There was no sorrow among the Nordic trifecta on the podium. Klæbo and Valnes, literally giggling through much of their press conference, were clearly quite pleased with how it all went.
“It’s always fun to win races,” Klæbo said, “especially here in Trondheim.”
Hakola concurred: “I think the World Championships is in the right place. This is not an everyday business, getting medals, so it’s amazing.”
For the Swedes, a close third place was no disappointment. “For both me and Oskar,” Anger said, “it’s our first World Champ medal. It’s super fun.”
The American men, despite not being party to the lunge for the podium, were happy enough with how things played out and they’ve progressed in this particular event.
“I feel like I’m finally starting to figure [team sprints] out,” Schoonmaker reflected. “The last couple I’ve just been really taken off guard on the second lap, how fast the pace gets. This time I was really like, All right, kind of wrote that down and remembered it for today, which was super helpful. You just get more comfortable every time you do it, I think, which is pretty sweet.”
No complaints about the wax, either. “The skis were super good,” Schumacher said. “Nice to be able to stride well up those hills and put them on edge on the downhill. They were ripping.”
And how about that Klæbo six-race superfecta? From the man himself: “So far, so good. We’re going to try again tomorrow.”
Working to stop that from happening, along with the rest of the field, will be a U.S. relay team of JC Schoonmaker, Zak Ketterson, Kevin Bolger, and Ben Ogden, in that order.
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