Tesero, Italy
To the uninitiated, cross-country skiing looks like a graceful, rhythmic activity set against a hushed winter landscape.
To the most dominant Winter Olympian in history, it’s an opportunity for destruction.
At the Milan Cortina Games, a maniacal Norwegian named Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo has turned the quiet world of Nordic skiing on its head with a frenetic sprinting technique that he concocted with his grandfather. So far, his radical approach has powered Klaebo to four gold medals at this Winter Olympics. If he wins his final two events, he would go home with more gold than anyone has ever grabbed at any Winter Games.
The killer technique that has turned him into Michael Phelps on snow is known as the Klaebo stride. It sounds even scarier in Norwegian: Klæbo-klyvet .
Traditionally, skiers negotiate the steepest terrain of a course by feathering their skis at a slight diagonal and elongating their stride to help them conserve energy. Klaebo does the exact opposite.
In the classic sprint event at the Olympics, he unleashed his signature move about 600 meters before the finish line. His rivals watched him disappear over the crest of the hill, knowing yet another gold medal was going with him. On the home straight, Klaebo had such a large lead that he glanced back at the empty track behind him and took a bow.
“He’s the best cross-country skier of all time,” said his teammate Einar Hedegart, as if there were still any doubt.
With his latest haul from Milan Cortina, Klaebo officially became the best Winter Olympian of all time, too. His nine career gold medals are the most of anyone who has ever competed at the Winter Games—and he can still win two more this week.
But the only thing more impressive than his record-breaking number of medals is how he wins them.
Milano Cortina 2026 Olympics – Cross-Country Skiing – Men’s 4 x 7.5km Relay – Tesero Cross-Country Skiing Stadium, Lago, Italy – February 15, 2026. Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo of Norway in action during the Men’s 4 x 7.5km Relay REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
When he unleashes the Klaebo stride, his opponents know they’re about to get trampled. His legs blur. His knees pump high. He stomps the snow with mesmerizing ferocity.
He travels at roughly 5:20-mile pace, uphill, with his feet strapped to carbon-fiber planks, after he’s skied at top speed for several minutes. Most humans can’t sustain that pace in gym shorts on a treadmill.
“For me, it feels like running with shoes,” Klaebo said. “But on skis.”
Klaebo stumbled upon the technique that revolutionized his sport during a training session nearly a decade ago. Frustrated that he was slipping uphill, he discovered that the only way he could summit climbs was to shift into hyperspeed, said his coach and grandfather Kare Hoesflot. As a young Klaebo experimented with this unconventional approach, his grandfather clocked him with a stopwatch. The results were undeniable.
“It was very much better,” Hoesflot said.
The rest of the sport found out just how much better it was when Klaebo busted out his innovation at the World Championships in 2017. Since then, he has owned cross-country skiing.
While the technique is now taught in ski schools across Scandinavia, few can replicate it without calling an ambulance.
Milano Cortina 2026 Olympics – Cross-Country Skiing – Men’s Team Sprint Free Final – Tesero Cross-Country Skiing Stadium, Lago, Italy – February 18, 2026. Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo of Norway and Edvin Anger of Sweden in action during the Men’s Team Sprint Free Final REUTERS/Stephanie Lecocq
The key is that he keeps a leg in the air for 61% of the stride, rather than 41% in traditional diagonal skiing. Instead of gliding, he is “literally flying up the hill,” said Hans-Christer Holmberg, a professor at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet. “That’s a nuclear option,” he added.
And after studying the technique extensively, Holmberg reached another scientific conclusion: “It’s not an easy thing for others to do.”
It’s so difficult that even Klaebo doesn’t practice it very often during his training sessions. Instead, he prefers grueling cardiovascular workouts for more than 1,000 hours per year. Cross-country skiers talk about expending energy in terms of burning matches. The Klaebo stride is more like lighting the whole box at once.
The only way to deploy this exhausting strategy without keeling over is to be fit. Absurdly fit. At home in Trondheim, Klaebo challenges himself once a month with a brutal 30-minute roller-ski climb from the sea-level fjord to a mountain peak, gaining nearly one-third of a vertical mile. At the summit, his grandfather waves from the car.
Then he waits for this Winter Olympics legend to do it all over again.
