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Olympics 2026 Winter Olympics Norway's Emil Iversen and Gus Schumacher of the U. S. race last month in Toblach, Italy. The two countries' Winter Olympic fortunes are intertwined, particularly in ski sports. Grega Valancic / VOIGT / Getty Images One country has a population of roughly 340 million and arguably the broadest and deepest sports infrastructure in the history of the civilized world. Its children often start competing and specializing in their sport of choice when they are about 6-8 years old. The other has about 5. 6 million inhabitants and a sports development system built around hundreds of youth sports clubs located in nearly every village and town. Maybe around 12 or 13 years old, things start to get more serious. Advertisement And yet, when winter sports officials and athletes in the U. S. need some help or are looking for a willing partner to share high-performance concepts, they call their friends in Norway. That’s a pretty smart idea that gets pursued both formally and informally. This month in northern Italy, if the U. S. has what a lot of experts are predicting might be its most successful Winter Games ever, it’s going to owe many thanks to Norway. A small nation in so many ways, Norway is the big kahuna in Winter Olympic sports, especially those that involve skis. “Everyone is trying to figure out how to make everybody faster, ” said Anouk Patty, a former college skier who has pursued partnerships with and acquired brainpower from Norway as the chief of sport for the U. S. Ski and Snowboard team since 2022. “If you have one athlete who’s skiing faster, like, you can see it. So the sharing of the knowledge and the techniques happens pretty readily. ” And then there is the old-fashioned way of making it happen. Alek Glebov was the head men’s technical skiing (slalom and giant slalom) coach for Norway. In June, he became the U. S. women’s head technical coach. Patty spent 30 years as a management consultant. She knows something about the benefits of asking the smartest and most successful people you can find for help. Norway is the all-time leader in Winter Olympic medals, with 406, 148 of them gold. The U. S. is second, with 330 overall, including 114 gold. The help comes in many forms. It’s also worth noting that it does sometimes go in the other direction. Norway’s Alpine team often trains at the U. S. ski team’s training center at Copper Mountain in Colorado, just as the American cross-country team sometimes trains in Trondheim, Norway. During training, in the offseason or ahead of World Cup races, Norwegian and American coaching staffs will team up to double the number of eyes that can watch and evaluate a skier go through each section of a course. Advertisement Aksel Lund Svindal, who was the world’s top Alpine skier 15 years ago, said Norwegians excel at keeping the sport simple. Most of them go about their business quietly. They come from a land that loves to win but celebrates humility and, in Svindal’s view, pushes all athletes to behave similarly. During his career, he spent plenty of time training and racing with American Alpine stars like Bode Miller and Lindsey Vonn. He learned from them that homogeneity wasn’t always the best thing, for the sport or even for performance. He watched Miller and Vonn draw energy from the heat of the attention they attracted. “You need personalities that dare to push it a bit further, step out of the comfort zone, ” he said during a recent interview. “There’s that passion, you know, that connects us all. ” The connection grew a little deeper during the last year. After a wildly successful partial knee replacement, Vonn decided to come out of retirement in 2024 to she if she could make a final run at the Olympic medal stand and end her career on her own terms. Her first season was frustrating. She couldn’t figure out her equipment. She called an old friend from Norway, a fellow Olympic champion who had worked with the same equipment manufacturer during his career — Svindal. After a few conversations, she asked him to join her coaching team. In Svindal, Vonn saw someone who could make the sport simpler, help her solve her equipment troubles, and talk to her as one “completely badass skier” to another. So far, so good. Vonn has reemerged as the top skier in the world in the speed events and a favorite for another gold medal, as long as an injury sustained last weekend doesn’t get in the way. Vonn isn’t the only one on the team whose personal relationships with the Norwegians mix with the professional. Alpine star Mikaela Shiffrin is engaged to Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, who is trying to come back from a series of devastating injuries and rejoin the sport’s elite. Does she pick his brain for tips? Of course. “He’s one of the great skiing minds in the world, ” Shiffrin said. Advertisement Others have taken it a step further. Cross-country skier Sophia Laukli, whose father is Norwegian, moved to Norway after graduating from the University of Utah. She moved for the same reason her teammates have done training stints in the past. “It didn’t take me long to kind of understand why Norwegians are so dominant in skiing because it’s kind of the equivalent of looking at football or basketball in the U. S. ,” Laukli said in an interview in the fall, before she decided to cut her season short. “It’s just it’s kind of a cultural staple. Naturally, you’re just gonna be better if you grow up in that environment. ” Immediately, Laukli found relief in all the roller ski courses she could frequent. Skiers in the U. S. mostly have to piece together roads that might mimic the hills of a race course and dodge traffic. It’s a good way to get fit. It’s not a great way to work on racing skills. Norwegians, she said, also spend a ton of time on Nordic treadmills, honing their technique. “You have this big mirror in front of you, and so when a coach tells you what you should change, you can actually change it because you can see yourself, ” she said. Norwegians, she said, may train less but usually train smarter. They spend countless hours doing very basic sessions — like purely double-poling, using the poles as their sole propulsion rather than their legs — and measuring themselves doing very standardized interval sessions. Mostly, they are happy to share a lot of this knowledge when they’re asked about it, especially in the sports they dominate. Norwegians realize that if they don’t have any competition, no one will care about their sport. Getting America involved and fighting for medals would be a welcome development. This is especially true for ski jumping and Nordic combined, which involves both ski jumping and cross-country. The U. S. does not have much of a history of success or participation in those competitions, except for a brief period in the 2000s when the country had a fully-funded golden generation of Nordic combined athletes, including Brett Camerota, Todd Lodwick, Johnny Spillane, Bill Demong, who collected four medals, including Demong’s gold in the large hill/10 km competition. Demong spent plenty of time living and training in Norway with the family of a Norwegian athlete as he developed. Now the Norwegians are in charge of the U. S. athletes. “Literally, we outsource the whole programming, coaching staff, everything to Norway for those teams, ” Patty said. “There is a bit of altruism on their side. ” Whatever it takes. “They’re a lot better than us right now, ” Patty said. “We’re trying to catch up. ” Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle Matthew Futterman is an award-winning, veteran sports journalist and the author of the forthcoming book, "The Cruelest Game: Chasing Greatness in Professional Tennis, " to be published by Doubleday in 2026. He has written two other books, “Running to the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed” and “Players: How Sports Became a Business. ” Before coming to The Athletic in 2023, he worked for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Star-Ledger of New Jersey and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Follow Matthew on Twitter @mattfutterman