Klaebo’s History, USA’s Glory—Olympic Team Sprint

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PREDAZZO, ITALY — Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo still had something special to do. American skiers still had something special to prove. But the Team Sprint is never as simple as just lining up and racing. Contending nations need to consider the field, rate the strengths and vulnerabilities of their competition, and make a plan to best take advantage of the circumstances. Then they have to ski it . . .

Not that they needed to, but the Norwegians must have come up with a different plan. For nearly a year—since the straightforward, matter-of-fact Team Sprint victory of Klaebo and Valnes in last year’s World Championships—I’ve been thinking of the Norwegian Team Sprint strategy in only one way: whoever is paired with Klaebo just needs not to get dropped. Stay out of trouble, avoid tangles, respond to the attacks from other teams but don’t allow yourself to be made vulnerable by launching attacks of your (efforts that could, then, be counter-attacked). When considering strategy, picking Klaebo’s partner in this team event seemed like a straightforward selection to make . . . but more than one Norwegian could fit neatly into that role. It’s a role that’s been performed admirably by Valnes in the past, and by Iversen before him (both of them on this year’s Norwegian Olympic Team roster). It’s a role that could have logically been taken on by Harald Oestberg Amundsen, who is both a very fast sprinter and the reigning World Cup Distance champion. All three of them are fast, All three of them are great endurance skiers as well as fine sprinters. None of them would be likely to get dropped by anyone else in the field, and all have a wealth of experience skiing in the should-to-shoulder, rough-and-tumble style of pack racing that is typical of a Team Sprint event. Pick one of those guys, right?

Not so fast . . .

Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo finds himself paired in this Olympic Team Sprint with Einar Hedegart. Hedegart is certainly fast, and it’s rumored that he possesses the highest VO2 Max of any Norwegian athlete (in any sport). That would certainly come in handy if Hedegart’s job was to drop everybody in order to give Klaebo a head start on the anchor leg. But is that even necessary? The Team Sprint finishes on the same hill as the Individual Sprint. Remember that hill? The one that’s made Klaebo famous for his unmatchable 11 mph scamper that’s all over the internet? If you put all the best skiers in the world at the bottom of that hill, and say “go,” Klaebo will win a race to the finish line by a mile. We thought the plan for the Team Sprint would take advantage of that advantage.

What does teaming with Hedegart get them? Those are questions that someone over in Norway must’ve considered. If Hedegart tries to break away, he makes his team vulnerable to counter-attack . . . and he already showed in the 10 k Freestyle (where he went out way to fast, and bonked like an inexperienced age-grouper) that he may not yet possess a full understanding of pacing. Furthermore, Hedegart possesses nowhere near as much World Cup Sprint experience as Iversen or Valnes or Amundsen. They’re less likely to get stepped on or pushed over or boxed in. With Hedegart—well, he’s fast, but the Norwegians really don’t know what they’re getting.

On the other hand, Hedegart’s raw speed is what Norway may be seeking. With his bronze medal in the 10 k Freestyle, he showed that he was a fairly even match for the speedy Frenchman, Mathis Desloges (already with three silver medals in these Olympic races). And France is starting Desloges in the first leg of the Team Relay (opposite Hedegart). One way or another, Klaebo’s performance is fairly predictable, so all the significant question marks are swirling around Hedegart.

The American Dream

It seems like the American men also have decided to try out an unexpected strategy. It would have been easy to assume that Team USA might hope to get Ben Ogden—the team’s most accomplished sprinter—into the anchor leg so that he could battle his way to the finish line among the other designated sprinters. A sprint finish for the medals, assign your best sprinter. Right? Maybe not. The US team decided that the anchor leg will be skied by Gus Schumacher, himself no slouch as a sprinter, and an occasional visitor to World Cup  Sprint semifinals and finals. But if Schumacher skis the anchor leg, then he’s likely to find himself sprinting against Klaebo and Federico Pellegrino and Jules Chappaz. Schumacher may not match up too well against those three . . . but if Schumacher is given a lead going into the anchor leg, there aren’t many skiers in the world who can chase him down. Perhaps what USA is counting on is Ogden being able to launch an attack in the penultimate leg that disrupts the other contenders, allowing Schumacher to coast home alone. Klaebo may already be well off the front by then, but who knows? Maybe there’s a medal for the Americans in this strategy that might not otherwise have existed.

“I was incredibly nervous before today’s race,” said Ogden. “But the parts, the moments where I’m nervous are, like, the lead up, you know? I know that once the race starts, I can just get to this headspace where I can be confident and be strong and be smart with my movements in the group. And that’s a really good feeling.”

Time to line up and race . . .

Men’s Team Sprint

Unlike the Individual Sprint where the event is raced in heats of six skiers, the Team Sprint is a 15 team melee whose selection of teams is based on the compiled individual qualifying times of each team’s sprinters. Once the final field is decided, they just line ’em up, and say “Go.” With 15 teams charging around the Sprint course, it would seem to be anyone’s race.  Ironically, pre-race ski-pundits would have us believe that the three medals should only be distributed among four teams: Norway, France, Italy, and the USA. But teh efforts, attacks, and foibles of many other teams are likey to have an impact. As other recent relay events have amply demonstrated, there is much that can interrupt all best-laid plans between the prediction and the finish. Soon, either those experts would look like geniuses, or fools.

Ogden would be compelled to deal with Desloges, Hedegart, and Anger in Leg 1. While the Ogden-strategy may have been to accelerate in his leg—creating a gap that will allow Schumacher to maintain an advantage—Ogden was not likely to pursue the all-out-from-the-gun that Diggins employed in the Women’s Team Sprint. It’s just too athletically expensive to race that way.

Ogden started front and center of the front row, where he was followed quickly by Austra. The first meters were confusing as Riebli (SUI) needed to scramble to find a replacement pole in just the first few seconds of racing. Ogden and Desloges made the early tempo. The field would begin to stretch out, more out of concern for safety than exhaustion.

“We did our one thing that we talked about: we were gonna meet on the right hand side of the exchange zone,” said Ogden. “Without fail, every single time we caught we came in on the other side, on the far and had to cross, and had to cross through like 15 people in order to get to our guy on the other side. And it was one of those things where we both honed in on the fact that being on the right hand side of the exchange room was not working. But it was also like, we can’t risk going to the left hand side and having him not see us. So we just had to sort of stick with it. And, you know, made for a couple fast first 20 seconds of the legs to try to catch back up.”

Leg 2—Klaebo’s fast lane

Klaebo may not have been happy at being forced to weave through the field after the exchange (and Hedegart’s presence in the crowded scrum of the transition must have been nerve-wracking), but this is not Klaebo’s first rodeo. He made his way easily to the front followed by Pellegrino and Edvin Anger (SWE) who decided he wanted to take the lead. Klaebo and Pellegrino were only too happy to let the confident young Swede do the work.

“I was trying to save energy and not lead,” said Schumacher. “When you start off out of the stadium and third or fourth, and another line comes up behind you, you’re eighth pretty quickly. And then, yeah, coming into the stadium, there was a big slingshot, and I was sort of like—I don’t know—I felt like I was generally on the wrong side of that . . . I kept my head, stayed calm, which I’m really proud of.”

“It’s nice to be able to trust Ben,” Schumacher continued. “To tag him far back, and he’ll tag me back in a great spot. And he set me up in that last lap perfectly. Then I had a pretty simple job to do, and I’m really glad I was able to do that.”

Leg 3—Hedegart’s patience

Hedegart inherited the lead from Klaebo, but he led at a pace that indicated he was not interested in laying down the law. Not yet, anyway. Hedeagart settled in behind Lauri Vuorinen (FIN) while the field spread out behind them. No real breakaway yet, but the group was beginning to feel the strain. There wouldl be less “trouble” for Hedegart to encounter on the course, but he wasn’t out of the woods yet. All of Norway held its breath.

Leg 4—Schumacher’s arrival, Desloges’ disasters

Hedegart had again come through transition with the lead, follwed by Sweden and France. Anger again wanted the front, perhaps hoping to create some gaps of his own. Desloges spent Leg 4 suffering his second broken pole of he day. France was faltering irretrievably, and the field sensed an opening in the medals. Team USA had sat concealed in the field all race, but Schumacher was begining to move forward, and to make his presence felt. Canada shadowed USA. With the field still hanging together, Team USA may have been ready for Ogden’s Leg 5 surge.

Leg 5—Ogden’s encore

Just like they may have planned it, there went Ogden leading Hedegart up the significant hill. Hedegart may have possessed the lead, but the USA was putting its plan into effect, as well. While all the leaders remained in contention, it looked like the pre-race script was remaining consistent.

Anchor Leg—USA!

Ogden had done his job, as had Hedegart. One lap to go, with Klaebo enjoying a small lead over Schumacher, Anger, and Pellegrino. With only the anchor leg remaining, what USA needed was a skier with flashing speed and bottomless endurance. That’s Gus Schumacher . . .

“The best way to do that is just go as fast as you can,” said Schumacher. “And I think today I did a good job of just looking forward. Klaebo was gonna ski this fast. If I can stay close to him, I’ll also ski it fast.”

Schumacher made his way to Klaebo’s tails as Pellegrino dropped Anger. Medals waited on the horizon as Klaebo shifted into top gear on his signature hill. Pellegrino made up ground on Schumacher, but did not close the gap enough to benefit from the draft on the downhill where the field spread out in a test of glide wax and base prep. Gaps held as skiers entered the finishing straightaway where Klaebo wrote Olympic history to become only the second Winter Olympic athlete to win five golds in a single games. Additional history followed in Klaebo’s wake, as Schumacher erupted across the finish line to grab silver for Team USA, his first Olympic medal, and Ogden’s second silver of these Games.

“Once the race starts, I just race the same way I have since I was five,” said Ogden. “So that’s a really nice feeling. And I think that the test of this championship has like, like, set me up really well to just be confident and leap, (to) control the pace and then go hard and be confident that I could, that I could make some time. So was a good feeling.”

Pellegrino offered the home-crowd yet another thrill when he crossed the line to deliver his second bronze medal.

The legendary American speedskater, Eric Heiden, won every single event on the speedskating card in the Olympic Winter Games of Lake Placid, 1980. Those unprecedented triumphs—from the explosive 500 meter sprint to the brutal 10,000 meter marathon—made it clear that even among the very best in his sport, Heiden reigned supreme. As performers and performances have specialized across all sports, it appeared unlikely that anyone would ever so dominate a sport again. Well, with his own fifth gold medal, Klaebo has proven to be Heiden’s equal. And with one event still remaining in cross-country events at these Olympics, a modern athlete may yet prove the sort of dominance once known only to the great sportsmen of history.

American sports fans certainly remember Heiden. But today, in Val di Fiemme, the performance that would make hearts beat and souls rejoice—the medal that would see American sports fans leaping from the couch in the middle of the North American night—belonged to Ben Ogden and Gus Schumacher, rivals throughout their long careers, teammates for a decade, and partners in the race that earned only the third cross-country skiing medal in America’s Winter Olympic history.

Way back in 1976, American viewers were glued to the TV sets watching races from Innsbruck, hoping to see Bill Koch win his second Olympic medal. Back then, that’s what we thought would happen . . . win one medal, win another. But while Koch performed admirably in the race that followed his historic silver medal, he did not earn a place on the podium again. Today, in Val di Fiemme, Ben Ogden made a little history of his own, becoming the first American man to earn a second Olympic medal. He did so in a display of grit, of determination, of long-standing cameraderie and cooperation with his longtime teammate, the indefatigable Gus Schumacher who, himself, became only the third American man to claim an Olympic medal.

Soon, we may stop talking about historic finishes for American skiers. As a team, most of the firsts and onlys now lie behind them. What arrives in their place is legitimacy and respect, and a future that may bring expectation and anticipation in place of mere hopes and dreams. American cross-country has arrived, just in time to establish a bright future when some of its bright stars are preparing to depart the stage. Mission accomplished, plan complete.

Men’s Olympic Team Sprint RESULTS

 

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Ogden remained refreshingly loose on the podium: “I was giving (Klaebo) some $#!* for the fact that they had the least cool podium outfits,” Ogden recalled. “And then he said, ‘How many golds do you have?’ I was like, well, that’s a good point, but they still have the least cool podium outfits. There can be no denying that . . .”