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TRONDHEIM, NORWAY — A few minutes before 11 a.m. on the side of a ski trail Saturday, a Norwegian plumber named Sven has handed me a cup of karsk: hot coffee mixed with moonshine.
Sven touches a lit match to the surface. It is now on fire.
“Clear, blue flame: That’s good homemade,” he tells me.
One of his friends blows it out for me, and I bring the eye-watering mixture to my lips.
Welcome to Trondheim, where, after 14 years of World Championships and Olympic Games outside the homeland of cross-country skiing, the sport has finally returned and, for the next week, will be living its best life.
In a country where people are said to be born with skis on their feet, tens of thousands of fans have come to rejoice in Norway’s dominance at Trondheim’s Granåsen venue — packing into grandstands along the homestretch, with hordes more trekking up and into the woods along the trails to camp, carouse and cheer.
For years, experts and pundits have fretted about the future of cross-country skiing — the threats posed by climate change, by Scandinavian dominance that crowds out interest and television audiences in other nations.
At this World Championships, those fears have been cast aside, replaced by joy, wonder and a celebration of the Norwegian tradition of heading out into the woods. Mika Vermeulen, an Austrian athlete who lives and trains a few hours south of Trondheim in Lillehammer, summed it up.
“Cross-country skiing is religion in Norway,” he said after Saturday’s race. “And today, Granåsen was the Vatican.”
The hardworking stateside FasterSkier crew has done the heavy lifting of recapping the details of Saturday’s race; as the correspondent on site, it was my job to gather the material out of view of the television cameras.
So, join me for a tour of the day-long thrill ride I took along the World Championship ski trails and in the city of Trondheim before, during and after the competition.
The tour starts with me wandering down the road from Granåsen back toward town.
I’d seen campsites next to the race course while out on a ski tour the day before. But I didn’t have access to the course on Saturday, security was tight, and I didn’t know how to get back to the same spot on foot. No one at the media center could tell me, either.
On Google Maps, it looked like there were some trails splitting off from the road. So, I started walking, then followed a family onto an icy path up through the woods that eventually connected us to an ungroomed ski trail.
The smell of kerosene was in the air: We were headed in the right direction.
When we hit the race course, I walked up to the first tent, which had a wood stove inside. It was four friends from childhood and military service who had trekked in with a sled the night before — carrying on a long Norwegian tradition of camping out before a big ski race.
“We are from the region, so it’s quite natural for us to come here,” one of Sven’s friends told me. “It’s something about the Norwegian culture — it’s hard to put words on, but I guess it’s the excitement with the race, and it’s the spirit close to the tracks.”
“Nature and campfire and some moonshine and have fun,” added the plumber, Sven Saksvik.
After my aforementioned sip of flaming cocktail, I kept walking along the trail, encountering increasing numbers of campers and fans as I went.
Three middle-aged men with tattoos and beards sat on reindeer and sheep skins, listening to heavy metal out of a portable speaker. Another group handed me a slice of reindeer salami from a wooden cutting board. A little ways back in the trees, a family cooked bacon over hot coals.
The father, Jon Hammernes, wore his grandfather’s wool pants, a pair of sealskin boots and a crisp Norwegian sweater that matched his wife’s. He said he’d pitched his family’s tent three weeks ago, to claim their spot.
“We, of course, like ski sport. But also the feeling of being with thousands of people,” Hammernes said. He said he’d brought 30 bags of firewood and that authorities had moved a standard spring vacation to give his kids the next week off from school.
The woods weren’t packed by then, but it was only 11:30 a.m. — two and a half hours before the start of the race.
At the far point on the course, I found spectators still streaming in, hoofing up a dirt road that led a mile back down to where city buses dropped them off. They carried skins and foam pads to sit on, while students toted huge portable speakers; alcohol and sausages were in abundance.
After interviewing an electrician who’d carried a television screen up to the track that he’d then spliced into the power supply from the Granåsen trails’ lighting system — “do not try this at home,” he told me — I jogged back down to the media center. I needed lunch, and more camera equipment to capture what seemed almost certain to be a Big Scene during the race.
I sprinted back up to the camping area just as the men began their 20-kilometer skiathlon.
By that point, huge crowds of students lined the race trail, sending up enormous roars as the pack skied past. I spent a few minutes shooting photos, watched a group of young people gulp Jägermeister from shot glasses glued to a ski, then descended a precipitous slope of mud and snow back to the road.
The second half of Saturday’s race ran on a separate course, and I wanted to see the finish. So did dozens of other fans, who joined me in jogging back toward Granåsen stadium.
I made it back to the photographer’s stand at the finish line in time to see a group of leaders that had winnowed itself down to about a dozen from nearly 100 starters. Among them were all five Norwegian competitors, including superstar Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, a Trondheim native who’s become the city’s golden boy.
Each time the leaders lapped through the stadium, the sold-out crowd of 29,000 went crazy, waving a sea of Norwegian flags. Klæbo delighted them by winning with enough of a gap to celebrate before crossing the finish line, and three of his teammates followed before the first non-Norwegian finisher.
One of the first people I ran into on my way from the photo stand to the athlete area was Klæbo’s father, Haakon, who I met two years ago when Johannes held a training camp in Utah.
“This is crazy,” Haakon said. “It’s like being in a Formula One race in Monaco!” I asked if he’d been up to the woods. He hadn’t, so I told him about my flaming moonshine experience.
“That is why you’re a little happy now,” he said.
In the athlete zone, racers came through one by one, each with their own take on the electric atmosphere.
Some said they couldn’t hear their own breathing; Gus Schumacher, the top American finisher in ninth, said firecrackers were going off above him. Christopher Kalev, an Estonian, described a haze along the trail from the campfires.
“You feel like you’re losing three weeks out of your life from the air quality. But it’s totally worth it,” Kalev said. “This is how it should be always — there’s so many spectators, people are cheering your name, looking you up from the start list.”
He added: “It’s always going to be miserable in a 20-kilometer race. There’s the moments you feel like you really want to give in, and if you were alone in the woods you probably would. But you can’t be slow when there are thousands of people cheering right there.”
Martin Løwstrøm Nyenget, the Norwegian who finished second, said: “It’s the closest thing to being a rock star for a day.”
Schumacher and Italian Federico Pellegrino had identical take-home messages: The huge crowds made the athletes feel “valued.”
“I think skiers at home oftentimes count themselves out as, ‘We are a niche sport.’ I think people maybe talk down on it a little too much,” Schumacher said. “It’s cool to see this and have validation. It takes it being a huge event in Norway. But people care about it.”
The head organizer of the championships, Åge Skinstad, put it this way in comments to Norwegian national broadcaster NRK: “Skiing is not completely dead.”
After the finish line interviews, race organizers held a news conference with the three podium finishers.
Sitting in the audience was a trio of 16-year-old junior cross-country ski racers who had the unique privilege of being forerunners for Saturday’s event — meaning they skied on the trail just ahead of the competitors to test it out.
“We skied into a huge wall of noise,” one of them, Sivert Mørch, told me. “I haven’t experienced that before, and I don’t think I will again.”
Once they were done skiing, the forerunners hung around in the stadium, watching the final sprint finish and then posing for photos with third-placed Harald Østberg Amundsen — turbocharging their dreams of some day turning professional.
Amundsen described his experience much like Mørch did: “On the first lap in classic, when there were fireworks up in the woods, I was quite shocked. And I knew that this is going to be something I will remember all my life.”
“I think we need some time to let it sink in,” Amundsen added. “But it was quite amazing.”
From the news conference, I climbed into a coach bus with other media and volunteers, following the podium finishers back down to Trondheim for an evening awards ceremony. The huge city square was packed with thousands more flag-waving fans. Just as the event began, torrential rains and gusty winds blew in; nobody budged.
Onstage, Norway’s Queen Sonja met Klæbo, Nyenget and Amundsen to hand out their medals. Then, Klæbo stepped up to a golden microphone for a victory speech — all in his native tongue except for his final words.
“For all the international people,” he said in English, “this is how we do it in Trondheim.”
Nathaniel Herz
Nat Herz is an Alaska-based journalist who moonlights for FasterSkier as an occasional reporter and podcast host. He was FasterSkier's full-time reporter in 2010 and 2011.
