Staff report
The men raced a 50-kilometer mass start skate earlier Saturday for their final race at 2025 World Championships. Johannes Høsflot Klæbo won, as had been foretold in the Book of Kershaw. He becomes the first athlete, male or female, to win six gold medals at a single world championships. Petter Northug, in 2011, and Klæbo, in 2023, previously won three golds and two silvers in a single year, out of six races held. Yelena Välbe, in 1997, won gold medals in all five races that were held in, well, Trondheim that year.
Notably, Klæbo is himself from Trondheim. We teased that fact in our pre-championships coverage, promising that it was an obscure tidbit you would hear little about over the course of the week. Thanks for sticking with us for recherché insights like that one.
William Poromaa of Sweden was second today. Simen Hegstad Krüger was third. You can find full results here.
Okay, now let’s talk about the vibes. The sun was out. Campfire smoke was in the air. There were multiple tens of thousands of fans packing the course, and even more in the stadium. Here’s what it was like for the athletes:
JC Schoonmaker: “Yeah, the fans were definitely keeping me going. I think without them…I don’t know. Just a crazy experience. I’ve never really done anything like that, so it was… Yeah, it was cool.”
Kevin Bolger: “The crowd was insane everywhere. I mean, it was like, there were times I knew the conditions were better next to the crowd, but I wanted to ski farther away because it was just too damn loud.”
“I made sure coming in on the last lap into the finish, I knew that I had beaten my group and I was like, I just got to stand up and soak this in because this is once in a lifetime.”
“Lots of flares, lots of smoke, lots of beer. Yeah, it was cool.”
Mika Vermeulen: “This has been the coolest day of my career so far. I don’t know, 80 to 100,000 crazy Norwegians, standing up there, partying, having fun, making skiing the coolest thing in the world. And I’m really not happy with my result, but it’s just so hard to get something negative from this day.”
Olivier Léveillé: “The crowds out here were crazy. I think the biggest crowds I’ve ever seen and ever raced in.”
Max Hollmann: “Energy in the crowd is high. Energy in me was not so high, but it was good. The crowd definitely carried me out there.”
“I think it’s got a big thing to do with the culture here. Like, everyone just lives and breathes cross country skiing. And it really shows because, like, I’m not really a big dog out there, but in the back half of this course, everyone was cheering my name, it was crazy. They look at the results, they check the bibs, they take the time to get to know the skiers. They just love it. Yeah? So, yeah, we just got to find a way to bring that to North America, and we’re all set.
Luke Jager: “I mean, oh man, it was fun in the field, just with so many people who were all just really fired up and didn’t really give a shit about, like, what was happening in the race. And, yeah, when your last name is Jager, there’s a lot of bottles of Jäger getting put over the fence for you.”
Jens Burman: “It was the sickest race I’ve ever done, with this crowd.”
Johannes Høsflot Klæbo: “It was amazing. I mean, it was fireworks. People were screaming, and you tried to just enjoy it a little bit as well. So it was really, really cool experience. I will never forget it.”
William Poromaa: “You don’t hear [any words], I guess, just screaming and shouting and stuff like that. You’re also in the zone, so it’s kind of hard to take in everything, but you see them and you hear them. So yeah, it was a crazy experience. And also, they had some firecrackers going on in the top there that almost blew our heads off sometimes.”
And here are some photos from the day. All photos: Noah Eckstein and Lukas Pigott.
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.
