One Tiny Country Dominates the Olympics—and Everyone Wants the Secret
- snitzoid
- 6 hours ago
- 5 min read
Really? Don't understand? Snitz will explain:
There's a famous Norse saying, "there's no bad weather only bad clothing". These guys are tough...Viking tough.
It's freezing, windy and there's no daylight. January for example averages 7 hours of lite per day in Oslo, Zero hours in Tromso. These guys are used to suffering. They don't care. They're carved out of granite.
They don't channel kids into basketball, football or baseball. No, just clomping around with skis or skates strapped on.
And yes I visited there for several weeks. It was fricken awesome! Check it out.
One Tiny Country Dominates the Olympics—and Everyone Wants the Secret
Once again, a nation with the population of Minnesota is racking up golds and winning the Winter Olympics. How do the Norwegians do it?
By Ben Cohen and Joshua Robinson, WSJ
Feb. 17, 2026
Norway leads the Milan Cortina Games with a dozen golds through Monday, continuing its historical dominance.
Every four years, Americans tune into the Winter Olympics and ask themselves a few questions. What is a quadruple lutz? Who would ever monobob? Why is curling so addictive?
And how does Norway, a country with the population of Minnesota, dominate the entire world?
In each of the past three Olympics, this traveling band of Vikings ruled the gold-medal standings and the overall medal table. Now they’re riding roughshod over the Milan Cortina Games. With a dozen golds through Monday’s events, the Norwegians were sitting on more than twice as many as the U.S. with less than 2% of the people.
Not that anyone is remotely surprised. The most successful nation at the Winter Olympics already has the most gold, silver, bronze and total medals of all time. Over the past decade, Norway has cemented its complete and utter ownership of this event.
And it’s not only because so many of the sports have Nordic right in the name—or even because Norwegians pop out of the womb in skis and skates.
The greatest run in the history of the Games actually began with a crushing disappointment.
When Norway returned from the 1984 Olympics with only three golds, the country was so alarmed that it immediately launched an emergency initiative called Project 88. But four years later, the results were somehow even worse. The Norwegians managed to come home without a single gold.
So what came next wasn’t about national pride. It was about revenge.
With the entire world descending on Norway for the Lillehammer Games in 1994, the country known for its oil reserves and sovereign wealth fund made an investment that is still paying off.
It created something called the Olympiatoppen, an organization whose sole responsibility was overseeing the recruitment and training of Norway’s second most coveted natural resource: Olympic athletes.
On their home ice and snow, Norway went from getting blanked to winning 10 golds and the medal count.
Since then, the country’s mysterious ways have left everyone scratching their beanies.
“A lot of countries visit the Olympiatoppen to figure out: What are the Norwegians doing?” said Thomas Haugen, a Norwegian professor who has researched the training methods of the country’s endurance athletes. “And when they come, they are disappointed.”
The facilities are modest. The schedule is downright sane. The people inside are perfectly willing to share their secrets with anyone willing to listen. They explain their philosophy of humanistic development and “joy for all,” wax lyrical about raising happy children, focused athletes and healthy citizens, speak earnestly about how their organization is more like an organism—and to the rest of the world, they might as well be speaking Norwegian.
“We think it’s an advantage for us that it’s very difficult to understand why it’s working,” said Tore Ovrebo, Team Norway’s chef de mission.
Norway keeps on adding Olympic medals, including in the ski jump.
Norway keeps on adding Olympic medals, including in the ski jump. Terje Pedersen/NTB Scanpix/ZUMA Press
One reason it’s working is that the Norwegian model is just about the exact opposite of America’s.
As youth sports become outrageously expensive in the U.S., Norway insists that organized sports be affordable for everyone.
They also prioritize having fun over winning. They make sure costs are low and participation is high. They encourage kids to sample as many sports as possible and don’t force youth athletes to specialize too early. They don’t even bother keeping score until athletes are 13.
Only then are the country’s elite athletes selected for training academies where they have access to top coaches and other elite athletes. In this nation powered by oil wealth, there is also a pipeline of talent that keeps gushing Olympians.
The latest example is Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo, a living, breathing, ski-sprinting advertisement for the Norway model. As a boy, his family moved from Oslo to the winter-sports cradle of Trondheim. He grew up dabbling at his local multi-sport club before choosing which one he would come to revolutionize: cross-country skiing.
Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo has dominated at the Milan Cortina Olympics.
Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo has dominated at the Milan Cortina Olympics. Julia Piatkowska/Fis Fis/Action Press/ZUMA Press
Now, as this Norse god drops the hammer on opponents, Norwegians can’t get enough of him. They stick his face on billboards. They worship his Klæbo-klyvet sprinting technique. And they marvel at his willingness to embrace all the boring stuff that greatness requires.
Before his biggest races, Klaebo limits his contact with the outside world to avoid getting sick. He was so committed to hitting the Olympics in peak shape that he even refused to see his fiancée.
Abstinence was clearly a winning strategy. Klaebo could win six gold medals here and has already shattered the record for career Winter Olympic golds held by three other athletes—all Norwegians.
But coming to Italy, there were no guarantees of another glorious winter. The country was reeling from the national shame of being caught illegally modifying the crotches of ski jumping suits. Once the Games began, they were humiliated again by another kind of cheating scandal involving an unfaithful biathlete.
And then Norway kept winning enough golds to make everyone forget about him—like his ex.
While the national strategy for Winter Olympics supremacy goes back decades, Norway’s preparation for the 2026 Games really began a year ago, when almost everyone on the team gathered far from the fjords.
Because these Games are spread across seven locations in Milan and the mountains, Norway convened its athletes last May at a weeklong camp in Gran Canaria, Spain to make them feel less like a bunch of individual skiers, skaters and ski jumpers—and more like one team. The goal was for the athletes to share training sessions, meals and ideas. “We are doing this cross-breeding all the time,” Ovrebo said. They left with healthy tans, a target of 35 medals and a plan to take over another Olympics.
And while other countries wondered how to become more like them, the Norwegians were already working on their next evolution.
“We need to be less Norwegian,” said ski racer Mina Fuerst Holtmann. “More Viking.”