By Noah Eckstein
GRANÅSEN ARENA, Trondheim — For a glorious moment, it looked like Sweden’s dynasty had fallen. With 7.5 kilometers and one leg remaining in Friday’s women’s relay, the Norwegian team — spurred on by the immense and adoring home crowds — had a seemingly insurmountable lead of nearly 40 seconds over their archrivals.
In the end, though, it was not to be. Swedish ace Jonna Sundling hauled in Norwegian anchor Kristin Austgulen Fosnæs in the closing stages and beat her soundly in the final sprint to hand team Sweden the win and maintain the Tre Kronor’s streak of perfection in these World Championships.
For those keeping score, Friday was the first day in exactly one week during which no measurable precipitation fell in Trondheim. This rough approximation of a “nice day” — don’t worry, the sun did not make an appearance — was the stage on which the final fight for team supremacy at these World Championships took place.
Unlike on the men’s side of things, where Norway has made the relay a profoundly unexciting affair dating back to the fall of the Soviet Union, the women have kept things marginally unpredictable. Before today, the women’s relay had been won by five different nations this century: Russia, Germany, and Sweden once each; Finland twice; and, okay, Norway six times.
Friday’s race, though, was really only ever going to come down to a battle for Scandinavian supremacy. Norway, certainly the underdogs in this particular fight, had a game plan to tilt things in their favor.
On the second 3.75km lap of the scramble leg, Heidi Weng put in an enormous surge up the long, long climb to the top of the classic course, splintering the group and giving the first hint that the Norwegians did not plan for this to come down to a sprint. Over the tail end of leg one, Pia Fink of Germany and Kateřina Janatová of Czechia both skied out of their minds to stay within touching distance of Weng.
Caught off guard and dropped hard, though, was Emma Ribom of Sweden. She had company from American Rosie Brennan, Anja Weber of Switzerland, and Johanna Matintalo of Finland.
A world-class sprinter when she’s on, Ribom’s form this week — and this season in general — has been well below her ceiling. She was visibly frustrated after her leg, and said in the post-race press conference that her emotions had included “a lot of ups and downs.”
Ribom handed off to teammate Frida Karlsson with a deficit of 35.9 seconds to Norway. Karlsson dutifully worked to close that gap to Astrid Øyre Slind, passing Czechia and Germany in the process, but at the second handoff Norway retained a full half-minute of buffer.
Leg three saw the sparks truly start to fly. Dame of Norwegian skiing Therese Johaug took off, skis and poles flying at her characteristic frantic tempo. Behind, Ebba Andersson — double-distance champion so far this week — worked to track her down. The enormous crowd at Granåsen (as well as yours truly, to be frank) really thought the home team had it in the bag at this point, the roars getting more ear-splitting each time Johaug passed through the stadium.
Johaug, undoubtedly smarting after so far missing the top step of the podium at these championships she came out of retirement to target, pushed relentlessly and put an additional seven seconds into Andersson by the close of her leg.
As Johaug came into the stadium for the final time the gravity of Norway’s gamble became fully apparent. Fosnæs is a very good skier, let’s be clear, but she was far and away the weakest link on this Norway team — her best distance result this season was an eighth place in the Val di Fiemme skiathlon. By frontloading Weng, Slind, and Johaug, Norwegian coach Sjur Ole Svarstad had hoped to buy enough of a buffer that Fosnæs could just barely hold off a charging Sweden.
When the Swede you’re trying to hold off is Jonna Sundling, good luck.
Almost immediately, Sundling started gouging seconds out of the gap, and after a kilometer or so it had become clear that Fosnæs would be caught well before the line.
As the air went out of the stadium, three large men in the crowd decked out in yellow and blue and waving an enormous Swedish flag started singing at the top of their lungs (all photos: Noah Eckstein). Nobody in their right mind would bet against Sundling in a sprint right now, and the win — fully out of sight for 22.5 kilometers — was now dangling in front of their gleeful eyes.
Sundling made the catch with five kilometers to race, having already made up the full 37 seconds. The Swede tried a couple moves over the last lap but, to Fosnæs’s credit, nothing stuck, and the pair came into the stadium together. As Sundling led around the final corner, Fosnæs swung wide onto the finish straight, hanging tough and even gaining a meter or two in the approach to the line. In the end, though, Sundling was untouchable, taking the win by 0.7 seconds.
The Swedish women, decked out in matching gold hats, were all smiles in their post-race press conference.
“It feels great,” Andersson said. “We have been working hard for many years to succeed with what we did today. We are super happy and it is such a team victory.”
Asked about what it was like to watch Sundling pull them back into contention, Andersson laughingly narrated the events depicted in the video below.
“I almost got something stuck in my throat and almost threw up, I think,” she reported. “Because it was more than expected to see Jonna go out that fast and minimize the gap in a very short time.”
“Am I doing the Heimlich now?” Karlsson then quipped.
The Norwegian team, despite losing in such devastating fashion, seemed mostly content with their silver. Fosnæs, saddled with immense pressure in front of an expectant nation, was proud of her effort.
“I’m really grateful to get the opportunity,” she said. “These three ladies are people I really look up to. They are really my idols, so I’m just really relieved and really happy.”
After the race, “They were so happy even though we lost the gold,” she said of her teammates. “It meant everything. To see that they weren’t disappointed even though I had lost such a big gap to Jonna. They did all they could to give me the best position. It meant everything and I’m really grateful.”
Johaug, a veritable titan of the sport, continued to heap praise on the young anchor. “I’m so proud and so impressed with Kristin,” she gushed. “She followed [Sundling] in the finish and she was so close. She is the woman of the future for the last leg for Norway.”
Hear more: Norwegian press conference:
Over a minute after the leaders, Victoria Carl of Germany beat Jasmi Joensuu of Finland in the sprint for the bronze. Carl was thrilled to deliver Germany its first medal of the championships, saying, “It’s really good for the whole team and we are very, very happy.”
Hear more: German and Swedish press conference:
For the Americans, it was a day of doing the best you can with the cards you’re dealt. Team U.S. came across the line in sixth, well over three minutes behind the leaders. It was their first time out of the top five at a world championships relay since 2011, when anchor-leg skier Jessie Diggins was just 19 years old. She and Johaug were the only two women who both raced in Oslo that day and were on course again today.
Scramble leg skier Rosie Brennan, still suffering through an année sans, felt good about what she was able to accomplish. “I’m for sure not at my best,” she said in the mixed zone, “so my goal was just to stay as close as possible and tag off with hopefully some contact with some teams. I felt I did that pretty well.”
Julia Kern, on the second leg, relayed some challenges of the gastrointestinal variety. When asked about a photo from today that seemed to show her vomiting while racing, she hesitantly elaborated.
“Yeah, it’s been something I’ve been working through this season,” she said. “I had norovirus like a month ago and I think I’m still dealing with the aftereffects of that. But also I think I just go really hard and on a course like here where you’re going really hard for seven minutes uphill I can produce a lot of lactate. I think I probably oversour pretty quickly and then you go in a tuck and that doesn’t feel so good on the stomach.”
While Brennan confirmed that her skis had “good kick and good glide,” Sophia Laukli and Jessie Diggins’s skate skis looked, from the sidelines, quite slow. Diggins, inarguably the best in the world at skate races of this distance, was unable to drop — and eventually lost the sprint for fifth to — Nadine Fähndrich, who is no slouch but also has just one career podium in a distance skate race.
Indeed, while intra-race comparisons are always difficult in a relay due to differing strategies for differing places, Diggins had only the fifth-best final-leg time on the day, 39.5 seconds slower than Sundling. This is not a statistic consistent with good skis for an athlete of Diggins’s abilities.
Hear more from the American team, on both their race and ongoing climate action:
This weekend’s 50km races are in the skate technique. With temperatures remaining well above freezing at the venue the soft and transformed snow that has so far flummoxed the American techs throughout this week, team sprints aside, isn’t going anywhere. You can be sure Matt Whitcomb and the good people of the U.S. wax truck will be up late tonight.
Tomorrow, tune into the men’s 50km to see if Johannes Høsflot Klæbo can complete the clean World Championships sweep. American starters will be Gus Schumacher, Luke Jager, Kevin Bolger, and JC Schoonmaker.
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 toAmerican 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.
