This month’s coverage of [global sporting event in Italy] is supported by Runners’ Edge Alaska. We sincerely appreciate their belief in what we are doing here.
By Adele Haeg
“Seven reasons why Klæbo is ‘almost not human’” reads a headline in today’s NRK, the flagship media outlet in Norway.
The list is less specific than you’d hope: “long-term plan” and “naturally ‘fast enough’” are numbers one and two. Also “winning instinct,” which was on display today in Val di Fiemme, where Johannes Høsflot Klæbo won his first Olympic medal of these games today.
Frida Karlsson, winner of yesterday’s women’s skiathlon and a sometimes Klæbo training partner over the middle part of this season, told NRK, “No one can relate to him. He’s so perfect, in a way, that he’s almost not human as a skier. You can’t be that perfect.”
Klæbo skied the same course Karlsson did about nine minutes faster (46:11), with Mathis Desloges of France right behind him for silver (46:13.0) and Norwegian teammate Martin Løwstrøm Nyenget for bronze (46:13.1). Klæbo, again, had time to take off his poles down the stretch while the field battled for second behind him.
While Desloges had the race of the day with his breakout performance, he flirted with potential disqualification after taking a “shortcut” to his first Olympic medal, as Swedish outlet Expressen phrased it. The Frenchman cut the course by several meters while skiing in the lead pack through the stadium, passing through some V-boards and moving from the rear of the lead pack to the front. The shortcut gained him something on the order of three seconds.
Desloges would receive a yellow card for failing to follow the marked course, which stays on his record for the rest of the Games but does not affect his silver-medal finish today. Norway did not file a protest over the jury’s decision (“That’s the kind of country that Norway is,” said Whitcomb. “Where they see that it actually wasn’t a difference-maker, even if it is a technical violation. That makes me happy.”); Russia did. The protest was soon denied and the result stood.
In the podium press conference afterwards, Desloges said, “It was just a mistake. I didn’t want to gain any places. I don’t think it changed the outcome. I would like to say sorry.”
Bronze winner Nyenget said of this moment: “The whole group tried to call [Desloges] back, but I think he saw it too late. I don’t think he gained much from it. That’s okay. It’s not my decision so nothing I’m thinking too much about.”
“The French team is on a similar level as our team,” U.S. Ski Team Head Coach Matt Whitcomb said when asked about Desloges’s breakout day. “When we have success, they’re one of the first teams that congratulate us, and likewise. It’s just such a passionate group of men and women that have each other’s backs, and you just love to see them succeed.”
Today’s skiathlon, not unlike yesterday’s for the women, was far from perfect for the American squad.
Whitcomb plainly told reporters, “We wanted more out of these last two days and we didn’t get it.”
“The guys, you know, just talking with Gus, who was involved in the crash with Zak, felt good. But, you know, you get taken out of contact with the leaders and the people that you’re drafting off of are slower than the leaders, so it’s just like negative compounding, sort of drifting to the back, or away from the lead at least. I’m pleased with where Gus was able to ski up to.”
Gus Schumacher, the U.S. ski team’s top finisher in 24th, and Zak Ketterson, 43rd, both crashed a few kilometers into today’s skiathlon. They fell on the same corner Jessie Diggins did yesterday. The name “corner of broken dreams” has been proposed for this increasingly notorious spot.
Edvin Anger of Sweden also fell on that corner, ultimately finishing well back in 37th. Instead of Anger, it was Truls Gisselman, 24, who led the Swedes in seventh place today. That corner caused chaos across the world today, though “American Carnage” is one viable name for it.
Temperatures today were colder than they had been for yesterday’s race, just above freezing, meaning there wasn’t as much “slush,” which Diggins said caused her to trip over the tip of her ski.
The downhill corner that took out Schumacher and Ketterson is treacherous in any temperature, it seems. Add another of Klæbo’s inhumane qualities to the list: He always, always stays on his feet. No one knows how he does it.
Ketterson placed 43rd today, in his Olympic debut. He didn’t have very much in the way of positive commentary on his performance today as he discussed his fall.
Ketterson said he had been wary of the corner he fell on before the race, and “hopeful that in the guys race they would be a little better at skiing it.”
But “Everybody just started snowplowing and freaking out and one of the Finns, I don’t know if it was Niskanen or Hakala or somebody, just ate shit directly in front of me,” Ketterson said. “I skied into them, broke my pole, fell pretty hard and then got back up and just burned so much matches trying to catch back up to the group with one pole. Didn’t get a new one until the stadium and then was kind of just fighting from there.”
Ketterson added that he “got a spare pole like halfway up the next hill, but it’s like a biathlon strap and it was too short. And I don’t know, it’s whatever, like shit happens, but I just hope I didn’t break my thumb because it hurts pretty bad.”
Ketterson said he saw Schumacher go down, though he didn’t break a pole and was able to return to racing more easily. Whitcomb told reporters that at the end of the race, he was “pleased with where Gus was able to ski up to.”
Here’s Schumacher’s take on that corner: “I didn’t see what happened to Zak, but he splayed out right on top of the drop-down into the right-hander. I got one ski around him, and the other ski just caught, spun me around. I was like, I’m going back off the trail. I got up and was just about last and did what I could, but you know, when the other people at the front are still going fast, it’s hard to catch them.”
The way both men describe these turns, you can tell how frenetic it must have felt at the beginning of the race. Also, Schumacher’s pre-race comment — “a little nervous to see the conditions, just get around the first lap. It’ll probably be a little hectic” — now reads as unfortunately prescient. And poignant.
After his fall, Schumacher couldn’t regain his “momentum,” he said: “All I could do is try to ski as smooth as I could for the next 18km. Then it’s just an individual-start 18km and you try to pick people off. I feel like I skied pretty well, honestly, for being back there. But yeah, it’s hard to feel a ton of momentum.” Still, Schumacher improved from his last Olympic skiathlon performance in Beijing, where he finished 39th.
Apart from the two men who fell today, first-time Olympians Hunter Wonders and Zanden McMullen finished in 31st and 36th respectively.
Wonders told reporters of his day: “It was hard. It’s a hard course, tricky conditions. Skiathlon always is tricky, mixes it up. With the I don’t know, just the muscle groups that you use, and it always takes a second to transition, but it was fun. Great Olympic debut.”
“I don’t usually get very nervous before races, but this morning it hit,” Wonders said of his start to the day. “And it was kind of surreal, but I just had to remind myself it’s just another ski race. You know, no different than any other day.”
“The last couple of days have been nerve-racking,” Klæbo would later say. “I’ve had a very high resting heart rate these days.” While Wonders shared in the nerves, he could not speak to his cardiovascular status. “I don’t” take a morning heart rate, Wonders said. “I’m not a big stats person.”
McMullen joined Wonders in the group of APU athletes who finished in the thirties today and who do not race with a heart rate monitor. “I don’t bring one over to Europe,” McMullen said.
McMullen called his day, “Not great. Not horrendous, definitely not great. It just didn’t really — it felt really good in the classic leg, and then I don’t know what happened in the skate portion,” he said. “I don’t know if it was just missed nutrition; I started like cramping up quite a bit. I just didn’t didn’t have it in the skate.”
Of the strong APU representation in today’s field, McMullen said, “I don’t think we’re doing anything different than other clubs. We just have a a strong group that gets to train together and I’m definitely lucky to be a part of that.”
Perhaps the Americans will count their skiathlon days as races to try and shake out their nerves. There are still many more races yet to come.
“You focus on the positives,” Whitcomb said when asked what the team does with a day like today. “You focus on the fact that they know they’re prepared, they know their skis were good, and they know this is just one of the days of the Games, and it’s now behind us and we have every reason to expect great races from both of those boys just as we did today.”
Finally, Whitcomb was asked if he likes the skiathlon, a relatively obscure event that is often contested just once per World Cup season, then awards a medal at the Olympics and at World Championships.
“I love mass starts,” was his take. “And this is just such an exciting event. I think it makes for an invigorating format. The crowd has something additional to watch in the stadium. And it allows different skill sets to shine at different times in the race. And so I think it tells an interesting story. I think the shortening of the skiathlon from 30km to 20km has made it even more interesting and more competitive; it stays together in these packs. And so I think it’s one of those events that pushes the sport forward.”
Klæbo, when asked whether he might win six golds for all six events he’s racing this year in Milano–Cortina, said at the press conference, “We’ll see. It’s a pretty good start. It was amazing out there. I had good skis, my body felt good and it’s always good to start a championship in good shape.”
His Norwegian forebearer Bjørn Dæhlie is the owner of eight gold and four silver medals from the Olympics. Klæbo, who is still just 29 years old, has eight medals after today: six gold, one silver, one bronze.
Klæbo and everyone else will race next in the classic sprint on Tuesday, Feb. 10. Klæbo will be favored.
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American skiing. We started with nothing and now we’re at the Olympics. You can read more about our first three years here, and donate to the Olympics fund here. Thank you for consideration, and, especially, for reading.
