Jörgen Nordhagen wiped the floor with his racing brothers with a historic margin of victory. A future in the Norwegian national skiing team would have been great, but it wasn’t interesting, writes Pekka Holopainen.
Pekka Holopainen Sports journalist
If a Nordic athlete is interested in absolute top-level success in his own sport, he should be quite careful with that sport.
Johanna Matintalo changed the globally fiercely contested middle-distance running in the last decade to cross-country skiing and is now a World Cup and maybe even an Olympic medalist. Eemil Helander shuddered in the spring of 2021 by announcing that the World Youth Relay in Vuokatti would remain the last skiing competition to be taken seriously and that future challenges would be found in track endurance running. From the first mentioned, Helander has the youth WC, from the latter the EC silver.
There is still a long way to go in tough company.
With Helander, the youth World Cup relay was taking place in 2021, and he already had time for the adult World Cup medal Niko Anttola. When he won the under-20 World Championship gold in Whistler last year in 10 kilometers (v), 33 seconds away, an 18-year-old Norwegian skied in sixth place with the fewest votes Jörgen Nordhagen.
On Wednesday of last week, Nordhagen won the 20-kilometer (v) mass start in Planica for the youth WC gold for at least a quarter of a century, with a historic margin of well over two minutes. The performance was one of the most startling of the entire ski season, but not as startling as the young man’s message with gold around his neck: a skiing career was in it.
A good indicator of success
If we think about how accurately the success of the World Cup for young people indicates adult glory in skiing, let us state that the toughest medal groups in the history of the World Cup include, among others Petter Northug, Sergei Ustyugov, Thomas Alsgaard, Ingvild Flugstad Östberg and Charlotte Kalla.
Skis and parade waters would very likely have been waiting for someone like Nordhagen, who is more problematic in free technique even in Norway, from which to go first to the A national team and then to numerous great achievements and eternal national fame.
In the big picture, for good traditional skiers, such as Helander, Matintalo or To Didrik Tönseth, even fast running is an easy and natural form of exercise. For ice skating greats and even experts, a side exercise that is more appropriate in terms of load physiology is cycling, which has also been known to be successful many speed skaters
Nordhagen has enjoyed himself on his bike so much that the operational management of the world’s leading professional team, the Dutch Team Visma–Lease a Bike, recently asked for his signature on a multi-year contract. That’s where the name also appeared. At the same time, the skis flew into mothballs. Stable resources and proportions almost take your breath away.
The chain of events tells about several fascinating things. Above all, it tells about Nordhagen’s greatness – without it, among other things by Jonas Vingegaard or by Wout van Aert to become a workmate of such megastars – potential as an endurance athlete.
At the same time, the young man’s game movement speaks of bottomless self-confidence and ambition. Financially, the choice is both an opportunity and a risk. As a Norwegian cross-country skier, Nordhagen would very likely have prospered; now the jackpot might be waiting for him. Millions are just not hidden behind a big rock in many sports like in men’s professional cycling.
If Nordhagen had joined the Dutch team as early as 2023, the team would have seen something as special as two young world champions of Nordic skiing, while the Slovenian star Primoz Roglic was still involved in the strength.
Third, Nordhagen’s polite farewell to a sport that is likened to a religion in Norway speaks volumes about his home country and its sporting ego.
Ingebrigtsen’s brothers, Thor Hushovd, Kristian Blummenfelt and many others have proven that a Norwegian endurance athlete does not really need to move on skis to be the best in the world in his sport.
Pekka Holopainen
The author is a columnist based in Pori and the only sports reporter who has been selected as Journalist of the Year in Finland.