Televisually speaking, my one complaint about the Winter Olympics is that even with expert commentary, the skills on display in many events are not so obviously different from one another that I can tell them apart. I cannot tell any trick that anyone on skis or a snowboard does from any other trick that anyone else does, I have to take Johnny Weir's word for what is an axel vs. what is a salchow, and watching ski jumping is like looking at a painting. But when it comes to Johannes Klæbo, perhaps the best athlete at these Games, it is hilariously obvious that no other cross-country skier can touch him.
For one, he's up there, while his competitors are back there, but more relevant to our purposes, he can pound out the pace on skis in a way that nobody else can. Look at this man go.
Klæbo's sudden burst of speed (at around 2:35 in the above video) is perhaps the single most shocking display of athleticism so far at these Games, for the sheer difference between him and everyone else on the course. He's splitting a sub-six minute mile running pace, uphill, in the snow, on skis, deep into a grueling, nearly mile-long race. Most people's hamstrings are not working 15 percent as effectively as his are. In Norwegian, his technique is called the Klæbo-klyvet.
By almost every metric, Klæbo is the greatest men's cross-country skier of all time. His 107 World Cup wins are the most in the sport's history, he is the youngest skier to win the World Cup, and at age 29, he already has 15 World Championship gold medals. He entered the 2026 Games with five Olympic gold medals, three shy of the all-time record for a cross-country skier, and his skiathlon gold was his second in Cortina. But Klæbo's ambitions extend beyond simply breaking that record: He has said he wants to earn six golds this year, which would give him the record for the most golds of any Winter Olympian.
Klæbo is a sprinter, someone who is completely dominant at the shorter distances the sport has to offer. He spends his summers in Utah, partially to get some altitude time in and partially to escape his massive celebrity status in Norway. When his competitors talk about him, their tone is one of reverential awe, and why wouldn't it be? He's a machine out there, which makes for great TV. Keep it up, Klæbo.
