More and more are choosing to leave their national team groups for their own ventures.
Frida Karlsson and Maja Dahlqvist among others.
Now the decision is made by the icon Martin Björgen.
– The recipe for success is gathering the team, he says.
Frida Karlsson had a hard winter and, above all, a lead-heavy Olympics. She entered the competitions with huge expectations on her shoulders, but it was a fiasco, and no individual medal. After the season, she made a drastic decision.
Saw the decisions
Together with sprint star Maja Dahlqvist, she chose to leave the national team’s training group. During the winter, she will compete in the blue-and-yellow suit, but Karlsson competes entirely on her own, and hasn’t been to any camps during the summer and fall either. And the trend is clear in the skiing world.
More and more are choosing to leave their training groups for their own ventures, including perhaps the biggest star on the men’s side, in Johannes Hösflot Kläbo. But Marit Björgen, the greatest Winter Olympian of all time, thinks it’s wrong.
– The recipe for success is gathering the team. It is clear that it is demanding if you are alone and doing your thing, while others are doing completely different things. It will be difficult to utilize the qualities that, for example, Johannes has. I’m in favor of having a team. You go to meetings, you train with each other and use each other’s qualities, says Björgen to VG.
“There is a lot to learn”
Björgen also believes that those who break out, in this case Johannes Kläbo, have a lot to learn from being in a team.
– I think there is a lot to learn. But as a coach and manager, it is important to be clear about it. If things start to go badly for someone, they will quickly say: “This doesn’t suit me”, says Björgen.
She believes that there is a risk that national team groups will soon be completely erased.
– All of a sudden there is a group of only four practitioners, and the rest are in other places. If the whole team feels good, then the individual feels good too.
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