On Saturday, Johannes Høsflot Klæbo won the 50km cross-country skiing event for his sixth gold medal in six races at these Olympics. No cross-country skier had ever won more than three golds at one games.

Klæbo set the record for the most gold medals won at one Winter Olympics …

… and the record for the most total medals at one Winter Olympics. Nobody had ever won six medals at the winter games, no matter the color.

He also has the record for the most total gold medals by one Winter Olympic athlete. He now has 11, while nobody else has more than eight. Including Summer Olympic athletes, only he and Michael Phelps have more than 10.

But those are just numbers. I didn’t need Klæbo to win all those medals to understand his greatness. It was clear the first time I saw him climb that hill.

Klæbo is the first skier ever to win the sprint and the 50km in the same Olympics. And what’s amazing is he won both events in exactly the same way.

He approached the final hill of the course a few strides ahead of second place — actually, in the 50km, neck-and-neck with the eventual silver medalist — then ran up the hill, on skis, and established a massive lead in mere moments.

Because of the way cross-country works, he didn’t win every race at the hill. In the 10km, the racers start at 30-second intervals, so nobody was climbing the hill behind him as he approached it; in the team relay, Norway already had such a large lead by the time Klæbo reached the hill that there was nobody to race.

But he did it in the sprint, the team sprint, the 20km skiathlon, and the 50km. (All of those screencaps at the top of the newsletter are from different races.) As a treat, I’ve synced all those YouTube videos up to the Klæbo climbs. I’m hoping somebody releases a supercut.

The Klæbo Climb comes in two forms. In Classical events, in which skiers must keep their skis parallel, he looks like The Norwegian Terminator, sprinting uphill like the T-1000 running after a car. In Freestyle events, in which skiers are allowed to use skate-like strokes, he skis like he’s mad at the snow, ferociously attacking it with all four limbs at the same time.

In both, he looks like he’s doing something totally different from whatever his opponents are trying to do. He’s faster and more powerful, gaining more distance with each stroke and also stroking twice as fast as his opponents. They look like they’re in slow motion … or he looks like he’s in fast forward.

TBH, they look like they’re climbing a hill with skis at the end of a long, grueling race. He looks like he’s fighting the hill, and winning.

Even within this superhuman athlete, there is a story of human resilience. Klæbo was not always expected to be an elite athlete. In fact when he was 15 years old, he ranked 18th out of 25 kids on his local ski team in the 60m sprint, and 24th out of 25 in uphill strides, according to his youth coach. In other words, he kinda sucked, even among his local youth teammates.

By 21, Klæbo had hills named after him. At the Pyeongchang Olympics, Klæbo won three Olympic golds, in part thanks to his late charges up a hill the Norwegian press called “the Klæbo-Bakken” — Mt. Klæbo.

Those golds came in the sprint, the team sprint, and the relay. He wasn’t good enough to win the longer events. In his first 50km World Cup race, he finished 40th, seven minutes off the lead. At the 2022 Olympics, he DNF-ed a shortened 30km race.

In the time since the last Olympics, Klæbo finally went from just an incredible sprinter to a cross-country god. He didn’t win his first World Cup race at a distance of 20km or more until December 2023.

But all this context is unnecessary.

You don’t need to know Klæbo’s backstory to understand the Klæbo Climb. You don’t need to know the records he set, or the difference between classical and freestyle skiing, or have opinions about the youth sports pipeline in Norway.

When you see that man sprinting uphill 49 kilometers into a 50km race, fighting the very concept of winter with every ounce of his body, pulling away from competitors who don’t even appear to be the same species … you get it.

To watch Klæbo is to be struck with an awe that doesn’t need explanation. It’s like learning a legend in a language you don’t even speak.

And it’s exactly what I love about the Olympics.

The cursing Canadian curlers won gold. They were never caught cheating again after their yelling match with the Swedes. They won the gold medal with everybody’s eyes laser-focused on that hog line. As a wise man once said: “You can fuck off, I don’t give a shit.”

Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid won five medals in five Olympic races after using his first post-medal interview to confess to infidelity in a failed attempt to win back his ex-girlfriend. Lægreid said after the first medal that he was having the worst week of his life. After, like, medal #3, it had to flip to “actually a pretty good week,” right?

The other day, I said that the rest of Lægreid’s post-race interviews were normal, but that was actually false: After beating French biathlete Emilien Jacquelin for bronze by .2 seconds in the sprint, Lægreid joked that Jacquelin must have missed the podium because he stopped to greet his fans, apparently infuriating the Frenchman. Later, Lægreid said he was learning to say less: “After my atomic bomb in the mixed zone, I feel like I need to really watch what I’m saying, because now, now that every statement from me can become clickbait”

French biathlete Julia Simon won three gold medals and one silver after being convicted for stealing credit card info from a teammate and a team coach. (The silver came in Saturday’s 12.5km mass start event; the gold went to one of the teammates whose credit cards she did not steal.) Simon was fined a total of €45,000 for her crime (€15,000 by a French court, and €30,000 by the French ski federation, of which €15,000 was suspended.) Luckily she’s in line to receive €80,000 from the French government for her performance. I believe she now has to serve the next five months of her six-month skiing suspension that was conveniently bumped until after the games … unless winning a bunch of gold medals is a get-out-of-your-suspension-free card in France.

Johann André Forfang, one of the two Norwegian ski jumpers who jumped in a suit with extra fabric sewn into the crotch to increase their jumping capability, won a bronze medal in the team ski jumping event. The allegations that some ski jumpers were injecting acid into their dicks to increase their girth in order to allow them to wear larger ski suits were never proven. But they were also never disproven. So who knows.

I think this is my first successful reverse jinx of the Olympics! (Unintentional. I look down on anybody who intentionally attempts to reverse-jinx things.)

Team USA’s 11th gold medal of the Olympics! Their most ever! Even more than when the U.S. hosted in 2002! I think I’m going to make tomorrow’s newsletter about that feat, though it might be weird if they lose to Canada in men’s hockey.

We are a Mixed Team Aerials country! Team USA has won back-to-back gold medals and back-to-back World Championships. That’s dominance!

What’s really impressive is the team’s depth over that span: Only one of the jumpers for Team USA, Christopher Lillis, has been on all four of those gold medal-winning squads. Kaila Kuhn was only on last year’s World Championship team, and Connor Curran wasn’t on any of them. Curran probably wouldn’t have been on this team if not for an injury to individual World Champion Quinn Dehlinger days before the event.

Every single jump counted in the final, and all three of Team USA’s jumpers stuck their landings. Meanwhile, every other team had at least one fall in the final.

The mass start events RULE! So much GAME THEORY! It’s like if the Tour de France was 10 minutes long.

And luckily, Team USA had a former professional cycler in Manganello. And it really did play out like a cycling race. Team USA’s Greta Myers essentially served as a de facto domestique to help the potential medalist keep her legs fresh for the last lap — keeping her clean in the crowded peloton, fighting forward with Manganello on her back, and eventually springing Manganello free for the final sprint.

Manganello won bronze, the first medal ever by an American (man or woman) in the mass start, an event that was introduced in 2018.

This was the final career race for the 36-year-old Manganello, whose story we talked about yesterday. She started speedskating in 2003, but quit the sport in 2010 after failing to make the Olympics. She gave cycling a try for a while, but eventually came back to speedskating in 2015. And in all that time, she never made a World Cup podium until this year, when she had a dream season as one of the best mass start specialists in the world. She’s apparently sticking with her plan to retire, even as she’s peaking.

I loved her reaction to having achieved the greatest accomplishment of her career … and the way Myers made sure everybody knew who to cheer for:

Incredible work from Bergsma, the mulleted 40-year-old Dutchman. This was his second-career gold 12 years after winning the 10,000m in Sochi. He basically bolted from the pack just four laps into the 16-lap race, and … nobody went with him. He built up about a half-lap lead on the peloton.

Well, one person went with him. Thorup, the Danish skater with only one career World Cup podium to his name. The two took turns leading off the front, although Bergsma eventually pulled away from Thorup, too. It was just the second Winter Olympic medal in Danish history!

The race was shaped by the fact that Team USA didn’t qualify a teammate for Jordan Stolz, who finished off the podium for the first time at these Olympics. Nobody wanted to chance a sprint against Stolz, so when Bergsma and Thorup got a gap, no one was willing to lead the chase and potentially help Stolz get back in the race.

I’m a big Mass Start Speed Skating fan! More fun than both the standard one-pair-at-a-time speed skating races and the crash-filled short-track races!

Redemption for Harrop after she lost the individual gold due to her inability to do the ski-on, ski-off sections quickly!

The competitors also did a slightly longer course than in the sprint races. Each lap in the relay had an additional up-the-mountain-down-the-mountain section that pushed lap times to about seven minutes instead of three. WHY WASN’T THAT THE COURSE FOR THE FIRST RACE?

Also, this race involved a new transition I hadn’t seen before: the racers re-applying skins to the bottom of their skis. I got so pumped when I saw this. EVEN MORE COMPETITIVE ACCESSORY-EQUIPPING

Surprise fourth-place finish for Team USA! Normally you’re supposed to be bummed about fourth place, but this was so out-of-nowhere that I feel like we should celebrate it! Especially since one of Team USA’s athletes, Anna Gibson, was not doing the sport this time last year. And the other, Cam Smith, described himself as “literally just a guy.” (Both stories by The Athletic’s Brendan Quinn, by the way, who has emerged as America’s #1 ski mountaineering journalist.) They were actually in bronze medal position up until the last leg, when Spanish gold medalist Oriol Cordona Coll passed Smith.

A sixth career Olympic medal for Armbruster Humphries!

And a first for her brakewoman, Jasmine Jones, a Senior Airman in the Air Force and a former track athlete for Eastern Michigan. That’s right, a medal for the MAC!

Nolte is the repeat gold medalist here — remember, she led the monobob after three heats and then Elena Meyers Taylor slid past her into first place.

One final Golden Moment for Italy! (Unless Italy somehow manages to win the USA-Canada hockey game, which would be a fun surprise)

Italy had never won an Olympic medal in freestyle skiing before these Olympics. They won their first, a bronze, in the women’s big air event. Now they also have a full set — gold, silver, and bronze.

Deromedis won the 2023 World Championship, so his win was not totally out of nowhere … but still! The first gold ever for Italy in this sport!

Another WEIRD SPORT WOMEN GET TO DO NOW!

From 1992 until 2022, the women at the Olympics raced 30 kilometers and the men raced 50 kilometers. Same at the World Championships.

Guess what! The women actually can go 50 kilometers! They did it at the 2025 World Championships! It was fine!

And now they’re doing it at the Olympics, too. That makes three events at these Olympics that used to be Just For Men: doubles luge, large hill ski jumping, and the 50km cross-country race. Once again: Gender Equality means Weird Sports for Everybody!

Part of the reason why women weren’t allowed to go 50k? Because women took longer than men and would mess with “the effective TV time.”

It’s true, the women’s race will probably take about 15 minutes longer than the men’s. This might ruin TV networks across the globe. But I plan on watching those 15 minutes.

Team USA’s Jessie Diggins is one of the people who pushed for the change. “To be totally frank, I think it’s total crap that the women never got to race this iconic distance,” Diggins said in 2022. So it’s fitting that this is her final Olympic race: Win or lose, the sport has changed for the better.

The favorite in this race was Sweden’s Frida Karlsson, who won gold in the 10km and 20km races at these Olympics and won the inaugural 50km at last year’s Worlds … but she withdrew from the race with a fever.

Door open for Diggins? She won silver in the 30km on the last day of the Beijing Olympics — another trip deep into the Pain Cave — and is the current points leader in World Cup distance races this year. Plus, it’s her last Olympic event ever. She’s gonna give everything she’s got.

After a German podium sweep in the two-man bobsled … we’re looking at a German podium sweep in the four-man bobsled. They’re already in first, second, and third after the first two runs.

The most interesting thing about the race: Whether Johannes Lochner can win a second gold in these games after a long career finishing second to Francesco Friedrich.

We were crash-free in the luge and the skeleton, but the 4-man bobsled is a different beast. It’s tough to get all those big boys into that big stupid sled down the track! Three sleds crashed on the same curve during Run 2, and the Austrian pilot, Jakob Mandlbauer, needed to be hospitalized, although his team assured press it was “just a check.”

Bumped from yesterday due to weather.

What would they do if it snowed again? It’s not supposed to, but, like, hypothetically.

Despite the delays, I still don’t plan on sharing any opinions about Eileen Gu.

A Swiss-Swede sweep-off!

Sweet!

Swell!

uhhhhh … Swaggy?

Sworry about that.

Swerving swiftly to actual analysis: Sweden had the best record in the round-robin, won their matchup against Switzerland earlier in the tournament, and won the 2022 bronze medal game between these two teams …

But I still think the Swiss are better. They’ve appeared in six straight World Championship finals, with four wins and two runner-up finishes.

Their team composition is really interesting. Silvana Tirinzoni and Alina Pätz used to skip for different teams, meaning one would always miss out on the Olympics or World Championships. They joined forces in 2018, leading to a rare situation where Tirinzoni is the skip but shoots third, while Pätz throws the most important rocks of each end.

Man.

I am so excited for this.

USA-Canada women’s hockey rules. Like I said: I think it’s the greatest rivalry in sports. But part of what makes the rivalry great is that they always play each other whenever a gold medal is on the line. They have met in the gold medal match at the Olympics or World Championships 30 times out of 32 opportunities.

This USA-Canada men’s matchup, though, is rare. It’s happened just two times in gold medal matches at the Winter Olympics, in 2002 and 2010. (In fairness, they used a round-robin format for decades; also, they met in the gold medal match at the 1920 Summer Olympics, so maybe three times.) They’ve never met in a World Championships gold medal match, and if they did, they wouldn’t have full-strength rosters, since the World Champs take place during the NHL playoffs.

This isn’t a once-every-four-years thing. This is a once-in-a-blue-moon thing. And it’s for the gold freakin’ medal, in the final event of these awesome Olympics.

The only time we’ve ever really seen these two teams play each other was at last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off, where they met twice.

In the first game, everybody fought each other.

In the championship game, they went to overtime.

Hell yeah.

One big question: The availability of the legendary Sidney Crosby, who left the quarterfinal against Czechia after a hard, well, check into the boards. He’s got a “lower-body injury” — classic hockey vagueness! — and missed the semis. Crosby is Canada’s captain and, although he’s past his prime, he’s got six points in four games in this tournament.

As a goalie enthusiast in all sports, I can’t get over the fact that Team Canada is rolling with Jordan Binnington, the worst goalie in the NHL. This isn’t an opinion. Per MoneyPuck’s goals saved above expected stat (or, in Binnington’s case, goals saved below expected), Binnington has allowed 25 more goals than expected this year — 91st out of 91 goalies who have played in the NHL this season, and more than any goalie in the past three seasons. But he did win the Stanley Cup for the Blues in 2019, and the 4 Nations Face-Off for Canada last year.

Canada’s offensive firepower should make up for any defensive shortcomings. Like I said yesterday: They have a power play line with three of the top four scorers in the NHL.

There’s no favorite here. The sportsbooks have it as a toss-up. We are learning more about how these players work together every game.