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By Noah Eckstein
DRAMMEN, Norway — City sprints once were a staple of the FIS calendar. The last 20 years have seen visits to Prague, Milan, Düsseldorf, Moscow, Stockholm, and, more recently, Tallinn. This year, the World Cup’s only truly urban stop is a classic of the genre: the iconic main drag of the Oslo suburb of Drammen, sloping up toward the perfect red-brick church at the top of town. The athletes, it turns out, have opinions on city sprints, and where they should happen in the future. See Appendix A if you want to be inspired by some truly excellent possibilities.
Anyway, at this particular historic city-center venue, Thursday’s classic sprint saw a podium of neophytes. On the top step was young Norwegian Ansgar Evensen, taking his first World Cup win. Just behind in second came Jiří Tuž, notching his first ever World Cup top-three, and Czechia’s first podium since Michal Novák’s surprise second place in Ruka in 2023.
Squeaking across in third — just four-hundredths behind Tuž and eight-hundredths ahead of Harald Østberg Amundsen in fourth — was the feel-good story of the day: Kristian Kollerud, just a kid from Drammen made (very) good on his fortuitous nation group start who ably picked apart a world-class field in his first time on World Cup snow.
The man was ecstatic, truly. He saluted across the line. He danced with the crowd. He hugged nearly everyone lining the course on the cooldown lap. He stood in the 35°F rain in the mixed zone for 45 minutes, with a smile on his face, chatting enthusiastically with anyone and everyone. Throughout this, the entirety of the race volunteer corps, presumably drawn largely from the local ski community, was losing their collective mind.
The mixed zone can sometimes feel a bit morose. Many athletes are disappointed with their performance, and even those who aren’t tend to be tired or cold or hungry or just thoroughly done with answering the same question eight times over by the time they arrive at the lowly print journalists who fall last on the media hierarchy.
Kollerud, today, was just 100% stoked.
“I can see my place from here,” he said to Nordic Insights after the race, pointing across to the other side of the valley.
“To be here, in my hometown, and deliver this first podium in my first World Cup race is just unbelievable. My goal today was just to make the heats. I was surprised I kept advancing, but I felt strong and controlled. In the end I did a whole lot better than that!”
“I grew up forerunning this race,” he went on, “and I’ve come to watch almost every year. It was what inspired me to ski fast as a kid, and I hope I can inspire some of these kids [points at rabid group of Konnerud IL juniors still in their ski boots] as well.”
Tuž, too, showed that high-pressure ski racing can be a joyful experience.
“It’s amazing!” he shared in the mixed zone, beaming. “So many fans and it’s really nice to do this evening race and to be able to pull off this performance. It’s a lot of motivation for the team around us, that the work we do is heading towards the right direction.”
These career-shaping performances by Evensen and Tuž and Kollerud, it must be noted, came after a brutal crash that took out the winningest male skier of all time, Johannes Høsflot Klæbo. Tuž said as much: “When Johannes and the others fell in the semifinal, that was basically my ticket for the final, because I could do the second half of the lap quite easy. I had so much energy in the final, I went full gas and never looked back.”
In that first semifinal, Klæbo was tucked into the pack on the bumpy couloir of a descent alongside the church, carrying the skiers down toward a hairpin and the final sprint back up to the church. On a slight righthander, Klæbo’s left ski slid under the tips of Ben Ogden. Vermont’s favorite son slid sideways, falling onto his back on top of Klæbo’s feet and sending him twisting toward the ground. Klæbo fell hard, the back of his head slamming into the crusty, refrozen snow with a violence unusual in cross-country ski racing.
The pileup pulled Ogden’s binding out of his ski, ending his race; knocked Norwegian Aron Åkre Rysstad to the ground; and sent Swedish phenom Alvar Myhlback — on skate skis in a classic sprint, per usual — veering off the course. Tuž and Anton Grahn, of Sweden, avoided the chaos and had the privilege of casually striding toward the line with advancement nearly guaranteed.
While Ogden and Rysstad emerged largely unscathed, Klæbo remained on the snow for a few minutes. With a coach supporting each arm, he eventually made his way straight into the Norwegian wax truck, looking decidedly out-of-it as he walked by the mixed zone. Frankly, this looked like a concussion, and possibly a serious one.
Needless to say, this sucks.
The Norwegian media was quick to ask Ogden if he thought he was responsible for stepping on Klæbo’s ski. “Maybe, I’m honestly not sure,” he responded. “I’d have to watch it back. It happened pretty quick. It was a really hard crash.”
“I mean, I was fine,” he went on, “but I saw Johannes holding his head. I think he seems okay, but I hope it’s nothing bad.”
Klæbo and Ogden ended the day ranked 11th and 12th, respectively, in the official results, as well as DNF. Klæbo secured both his sixth (!) World Cup overall crystal globe and eighth (!!) sprint globe on the day, though it was clearly a Pyrrhic victory in the moment.
Ogden’s second-place qualification and strong form up until it all went sideways were a bright spot on an otherwise difficult day for the American men.
JC Schoonmaker was 37th. Zak Ketterson, just behind in 38th, wanted more from his body. “I felt pretty flat, pretty slow,” he said after his qualifier.
John Schwinghammer (CGRP), in an impressive 40th, seemed remarkably unfussed for having just made his World Cup debut, and done so ably.
How did it go? “It was okay,” he mused. “I didn’t have the pop at the end that I wanted to have.”
The magic of the situation wasn’t totally lost on him, though. “It feels good to be here,” he continued. “It’s fantastic. It’s cool being in the hotel with everybody. Yeah, it’s been awesome.”
These three were not much more than a half-second behind 30th, so the groundwork is there even if the sensations and results aren’t.
Fellow Craftbury Greenie Jack Young, 55th, has not yet been able to translate his breakthrough in skate sprinting over to the classic side. He spoke to the complex calculus he’s had to make about prioritizing certain techniques at certain times throughout this season while he works to bring his classic sprinting up to par with his skate sprinting.
“I mean, it was hard because to qualify for the Olympics, I was like, I need to skate well,” he reflected in the mixed zone. “But in order to get the start, I had to classic ski well [he was not granted a start in the classic sprint in Tesero after all]. So it’s like, I was kind of trying to do both. But then, once Davos happened, I was strictly focusing on classic skiing. But it was kind of just too little too late.”
“And after the Olympics, I moved back to skating,” he continued, “because I had more earnings potential and, like, scoring-point potential in skating. So all things considered, I’m fine with that.”
I too would be fine with five top-30s and a fourth place in skate sprints this season, to be totally honest.
Gus Schumacher had an uncharacteristically rough day, finishing in 53rd.
To be very clear, missing comments here from Schoonmaker and Schumacher were due to reporter negligence rather than any sour grapes on the part of the athletes.
Up next is the legendary Holmekollen 50-kilometer race, skate this year, on Saturday. In a fun if slightly concerning twist, men and women will be on course at the same, so it should be quite a spectacle both in person and on television. Expect woodsmoke, flannel, and hordes of drunken Norwegian university students lining the trails.
APPENDIX A
Where would you host a city sprint if you could have one anywhere?
Iris de Martin Pinter (Italy): It was my dream to race the Drammen and it would be so cool if they brought it to Italy.
Simone Dapra (Italy): Roma, baby!
Lauri Vuorinen (Finland): New York. Not Helsinki? Nah, New York.
Jules Chappaz (France): Near my hometown in Annecy. But I really like racing in Drammen, it’s one of my favorite venues. For me, it’s kind of a monument.
Vili Črv (Slovenia): Ljubljana for sure. The city center is extremely nice. So I think the ski race would fit really nice into the city centre and races like this are a good show and a good promotion. I’m a bit sad that it’s not more of this kind of race. Especially because I think it’s super interesting. There are many cities that can see a potential in this kind of race.
Ben Ogden (USA): Maybe Burlington. Yeah, that’d be cool.
Jessie Diggins (USA): The Twin Cities, obviously! Maybe in Allianz Field. And if it weren’t in Minnesota? Uh, Central Park in Manhattan would be sweet.
Nadine Fähndrich (Switzerland): In Luzern, my hometown.
Theo Schely (France): Right here! Keep it the way it is, it’s so nice already.
APPENDIX B
Antoine Cyr shares some extremely real real talk (read: he doesn’t like it, in a profane way) about his views of Nordiq Canada’s Olympic selection process:
APPENDIX C
Lucas Chanavat speaks not only about his race today but also candidly about his health, divulging that he is training fewer than 500 hours this year [same, Chanavat, same, if for very different reasons]
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