This would normally be that time of year when the entire athletics world is marvelling at the superhuman feats of Jakob Ingebrigtsen. Ever since breaking on to the international stage in 2018, winning two European gold medals for Norway at age 17, Ingebrigtsen has been one of the most dominant forces in global middle-distance running.
There has been the occasional championship blip – his crazy front-running tactics over 1,500m at the Paris Olympics being the prime example – but his otherwise athletic audacity and consistency have been the envy of the rest of the world.
So much so that most middle-distance runners now imitate Ingebrigtsen’s approach to training and racing, as recently detailed in The Norwegian Method Applied, published last month by Norway’s two-time Olympic runner Marius Bakken. Anyone for a double threshold run?
Sadly, Ingebrigtsen has yet to race this year, as he continues to recover from surgery on his Achilles tendon at the start of February. At 25, he’s still got ample time to add to his 41 championship medals. Besides, Norway has plenty of other star athletes to follow this summer, including Henriette Jaeger, the 22-year-old now leading the way in European women’s 400m running, and 400m hurdles world record holder Karsten Warholm.
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Some of this came to mind when reading how many, particularly in the US, are marvelling at Norway’s progress at the World Cup. The New Yorker ran a 2,000-word profile of Erling Haaland last Tuesday under the strapline: “Norway’s hulking striker brought his country back to the World Cup for the first time in almost 30 years. How far can they go?”
Whether or not Norway can get past Brazil at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium on Sunday, part of the marvelling is at Norway’s apparent global sporting prowess as a whole – far beyond the World Cup and indeed the likes of Ingebrigtsen.
“Erling Haaland, Norway’s large, maniacal striker, has several exceedingly Norwegian traits,” Zach Helfand writes in the New Yorker. “He sometimes exercises by chopping wood in the forest. He consumes six thousand calories a day. (He’s fond of beef heart.) After training sessions, he drinks raw milk ... He has flowing blond hair, often compared to a Viking’s. He brings the intensity of a raiding party to the sport. Haaland scores goals at a higher rate than almost any soccer player ever.”
It’s not all a blindly sporting fascination, Helfand also noting that “Norway is one of the world’s wealthiest countries, with the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, mainly thanks to its oil reserves”. Money invariably helps in the sporting development of any nation, although it’s rarely enough to swear by.
At the Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina earlier this year, Norway topped the overall medal table with 18 gold medals, 12 silver and 11 bronze – ahead of the USA (who finished with 12 gold, 12 silver and nine bronze). Norway’s population is 5.65 million people, while the USA have 342.3 million to draw from. You do the math.
Norway’s Johannes Høsflot Klaebo also won an unprecedented sweep of all six cross-country skiing events, bringing his overall gold medal tally to 11, having won five before. Only Michael Phelps has won more gold medals in Olympic history, winter or summer Games.
US running coach Steve Magness also addresses the subject this week in an article titled “Don’t keep score: Norway’s sporting success in youth sports and the World Cup”.
Magness is speaking from experience here, given there are two chapters in his 2025 book Win the Inside Game in which he evaluates the Norwegian and US system for developing talent and motivation.
“This is Norway’s youth sports,” he writes. “Everyone gets a trophy. No keeping score until 11. No national championships until 13. Motto: ‘Joy of Sport for All’. They let kids be kids and it works ...”
Magness also notes that Norway’s football association’s entire motto is “as many as possible, as long as possible, as good as possible”. This is also reflected in their coaching style, which he says varies based on sport and is “generally taking advantage of a more modern ecological approach”.
He also makes the point that instead of the old-school football coach dictating and demanding, doing his best job of imitating a drill sergeant, Norway and other Scandinavian countries prefer “more constraints-led approaches” – with more of an emphasis on play, exploration and varying the game dynamics.
One of Norway’s leading winter sport coaches, Trond Nystad, also told the FasterSkier website last year that Norway’s athletic success doesn’t start with medals or podiums.
“The model of Norwegian sport is to have as many kids as possible, for as long as possible, and try to make them as good as possible,” he said. “It’s about being a champion of the world, not a world champion ... the focus is on learning, mastering things, having fun, not on winning.”
Given Ireland’s approximately similar population size to Norway, there may be some lessons in all this when it comes to advancing our own global sporting prowess. Particularly given the perception that, as a sporting nation, things can sometimes get overly competitive at too young an age, or indeed that some sporting prospects are simply specialising too soon.
Historically, however, this has done no harm when it comes to punching above our weight in certain Olympic sports, namely boxing and rowing, and more frequently in European athletics.
But it’s also true that there’s a part of our own sporting prowess that can never be measured on the global scale, but on the almost half a million people who will go through the turnstiles in Croke Park over the next four weekends.
