At the end of one of the great races in the history of the Winter Olympics, there was the greatest athlete in the history of the Winter Olympics. After a little over two hours of racing Johannes Høsflot Klæbo won his sixth gold medal of these Games when he beat his Norwegian teammate Martin Løwstrøm Nyenget by 17.4 seconds to win the men’s 50km classic.
The triumph meant the 29-year-old set the record for the most gold medals in a single Winter Games, set by the US speed skater Eric Heiden when he won five at Lake Placid in 1980. In an age of exaggeration and in an industry that loves overstatement, it is entirely true to say that there has never been anything quite like it.
Klæbo now has 11 Olympic gold medals, which puts him one ahead of the entire country of India on the all-time table. Were he a nation, he would be ninth in the 2026 medal standings. In this past fortnight he has competed in 10 races across 115km, in six different events, in the space of just 14 days, and won every single one of them.
Nobody has ever swept all the cross-country events in a single Olympics before; truth is nobody has ever imagined it was possible in such a gruelling sport.
Only the American swimmer Michael Phelps, with 23, has ever won more Olympic gold medals than Klæbo. In this past week he has overtaken Laris Latynina, Carl Lewis, Katie Ledecky, Paavo Nurmi and everyone else in the Olympic pantheon. “Is it 14 left or something?” Klæbo said after he had won his fifth gold on Wednesday. “It’s going to be way too many.” Only 13 now.
But he had to earn it. The 50km is the hardest event in the Olympics. For the majority of the race, Klæbo was out alone with Nyenget and Emil Iversen, all tucked one behind the other like three geese flying south for the winter. They moved in lockstep as they looped in, out and around the trails, between larch trees and up and down the hills. There were only tenths of seconds between the three of them. By 30km the man racing in fourth place, the Russian Savelii Korostelev, was almost two minutes off, and he was another half-minute on from everyone else.
Iversen finally broke and slipped back halfway through the last lap, but Nyenget kept on. He attacked twice in the final two kilometres but couldn’t shake off Klæbo and by the time they came into sight of the finish line they were dead level. Then, on the final uphill, Klæbo finally made the move everyone had been waiting to see, wondering, all the while, whether he still had it in him after all this racing. He did. As he entered the bend into the home stretch he was a tenth of a second ahead, and was cheered into history by thousands of raucous fans.
It was Klæbo’s greatest victory. He began this sport as a sprinter, competing in the 1,500m, but over time has moved up into marathon racing too, with the ultimate aim of winning this, the most prestigious event in the sport. To do it, he has had to master two entirely different techniques: classical, in which the skis have to run parallel on groomed tracks, and freestyle, in which they move in a V-shape. The two are as different as breaststroke is from butterfly.
Not satisfied with that, Klæbo invented one all of his own, an uphill running technique, a sort of high-tempo diagonal stride that he used to devastating effect in the cross-country classic sprint. The clip of him storming up a 240m hill, in skis, at six-minute-mile pace, is one of the most startling sights of these Olympics. It is, his childhood coach has explained, something he first learned by accident, “because he didn’t have enough wax on his skis, and it was a bit slippy, and he just found out ‘OK, if I run I can make it.’” It sounds like it was born out of the same sheer bloody stubbornness which has driven him to these six victories.
If you still don’t get it, measure him by the opinions of his rivals, even if it it means they end up like little sketches drawn on the foot of the page to give everything a sense of true scale.
“He’s the GOAT in the whole sport, the greatest skier we will ever see,” said France’s Theo Schley. “I like to go to every race thinking that it’s a race for the win, but these days, a lot of the time it’s a race for second,” said the USA’s Ben Ogden. “He is just at a different level here, he is the greatest of all time,” said his teammate Einar Hedegart. “He’s the best skier of all time,” said another Norwegian, Oskar Opstad Vike, “and it’s an honour to share a podium with him.”
And these are just the athletes who are at least competing for the other medals, let alone the people making up the field. “I think,” said Great Britain’s Andrew Musgrave, who finished sixth, “that Johannes could probably have gone backwards faster than me up the last hill.”