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As the runners hit the penultimate bend, the racing pulse of the music starts to beat faster. The choice, and the timing, are perfect: Darude’s now semi-ancient trance track “Sandstorm.” But very few of the 15,000 in attendance can hear any of it.
Instead, the fans inside the Bislett Stadium in Oslo are on their feet, cheering and roaring as Norway’s distance-running superstar, Jakob Ingebrigtsen, tries desperately to hold off Timothy Cheruiyot of Kenya at the climax of the main event: the men’s 1,500 meters.
Ingebrigtsen, sensing the crowd’s desperation, digs deep and then, at the last, dives forward, feet off the ground, to beat his rival to the line. There is a moment of silence. Ingebrigtsen’s name flashes up on the screen as the winner. The stadium shakes with the noise.
Norway’s annual celebration of track and field, the Bislett Games, has been a highlight of the country’s sporting calendar for more than half a century. For a long time, though, its headline acts were imported; once, organizers committed a significant portion of their appearance budget to Usain Bolt to persuade him to come.
Now, the star turns come from home. Norway, with its population of just 5.5 million and its traditional association with sports that take place on skis or skates, has suddenly become a year-round bastion of sporting excellence.
In Paris, Norway hopes to see both Ingebrigtsen (from Sandnes, in the southwest) and the hurdles star Karsten Warholm (born amid the fjords of the west coast) win gold. Yet thanks to a combination of money, time, thought and probably a little luck, they are only two of the jewels in the country’s crown.
Norway also possesses four of the world’s best soccer players — the Premier League stars Erling Haaland and Martin Odegaard and the Champions League winners Ada Hegerberg and Caroline Graham Hansen — as well as leading lights in tennis (Casper Ruud) and golf (Viktor Hovland.)
Those last two are part of the team the country sent to the Olympics in Paris, where Norway also has medal hopes in sports as diverse as handball, beach volleyball and the various disciplines of shooting. The country’s most dominant sports star, Magnus Carlsen, would probably win gold, too, if chess were an Olympic sport.
It is a pedigree so unfamiliar that Norway still finds it dazzling. “It’s something we talk about a lot,” said the long-distance runner Karoline Bjerkeli Grovdal, a four-time Olympian. Mostly, they talk about how it happened, and whether they can make it happen again.
Time and Money
Tore Ovrebo, the director of Norway’s elite sports program, has a parable to explain how Norway achieved this success. It is set on the west coast of Norway, involves three shrimp-fishing brothers and sounds suspiciously like Norse folklore.
Every year, he explained, these brothers try to outdo each other to land the biggest catch. The one with the brightest ideas or the best technology would return home with the most shrimp.
“At the end of the season, they come back and they share their knowledge and start again.” he said. “The next year, maybe another brother would be No. 1. So, after many years, they are way ahead of the rest of the world.”
That, he said, is how Norway’s elite sports programs work. “Our main goal is to beat all of those people out there who do not speak Norwegian,” he said. “There are a lot of them, and they are in a hurry. So we cooperate when we can, and we compete when we must. It’s a nice slogan, isn’t it?”
It is, but it is not just a slogan. The day before the Bislett meet, hundreds of the country’s coaches gathered at the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences for a conference, eagerly taking notes as peers gave presentations on topics like talent development in handball or how to engage Gen Z athletes.
This sort of mutual growth started in the 1980s, when Norway was in a sporting funk, according to Matti Erik Goksoyr, a professor in sports history at the school. With the country struggling even in winter sports, while also planning to host the Winter Games in Lillehammer in 1994, the country’s elite sports organizations had to act.
But the real accelerant was money. At roughly the same time, Norway was enjoying an oil boom that would make it one of the richest countries in the world.
“It felt like there was more money around,” Goksoyr said. Investment from the state, from business and from local communities paid for “more coaches, more professionalism, bigger support apparatus for athletes, better equipment.”
More than anything, though, it enabled Norway to take full advantage of its position as a place, Ovrebo said, where “the legitimacy of doing sport is high.” By the time they turn 25, 93 percent of Norwegians have taken part in a sport, whether beach volleyball or Nordic skiing. The country’s affluence means there are not just sports facilities but people to provide coaching and transport.
“Most families have parents who work eight hours a day,” Ovrebo said. “That means they can use a few hours to be with their kids, to volunteer as a coach. If you are working 16 hours a day to survive, you do not have time to do that.”
The philosophy is to keep sports opportunities open to everyone for as long as possible. “At the elite level, things are very, very, very professional,” Ovrebo said. But before then, the focus is on retention.
Keeping score is discouraged for participants until age 13, he said. Children are encouraged to remain in sports regardless of ability.
“Big nations are all about selection, getting rid of people,” Ovrebo said. Norway allows children who are “late developers, or whose parents could not support them” time to find their potential, he said.
“Most kids will not turn out to be international champions, but they should still feel the years they spent in sport is a positive asset,” he added.
The combined effect is that, despite its relatively small population, Norway is not small at all when it comes to sports. “The talent pool is huge,” Ovrebo said.
Chance Connections
Warholm is as good a case study as any of Norway’s success. Watching him now — an Olympic gold medalist, a three-time world champion in the 400-meter hurdles — it seems as if he were born for the spotlight.
Before his race at Bislett, as the stadium fizzed with anticipation, he prowled by the starting blocks in Lane 7, slapping his thighs and pumping his chest. Later, despite a photo-finish defeat by Alison dos Santos of Brazil, he was in high spirits, demonstrating to an Australian television crew that he could, indeed, open a bottle of beer with a hook on the back of his spikes.
The details of his story, though, vindicate Norway’s approach. Warholm grew up in a tiny village in the country’s far west. He attributes his prominence to his meeting with Leif Olav Alnes, a faintly grizzled, vastly experienced coach who had been considering retirement when Warholm approached him.
Alnes agreed not only to act as an adviser but to go “all in.” Their relationship proved so fruitful, and so fascinating, that they would co-star in their own fly-on-the-wall documentary. “If I had not met Leif,” Warholm said, “I would not have a world record.”
When he looks across Norway’s sporting landscape, he sees much the same picture. He is quick to note that, for all the systems and seminars and sharing of knowledge, there is a lot of “coincidence” in the backgrounds of Norway’s best and brightest.
Ingebrigtsen is from a family of runners, famous before he had even turned professional thanks to another documentary series, “Team Ingebrigtsen,” which detailed his father’s attempts to train him and his older brothers.
The show was a hit in Norway; the family broke apart last year amid accusations from Jakob and his siblings that their father, Gjert, had used “physical violence and threats as part of our upbringing.” Gjert Ingebrigtsen was subsequently charged with physically abusing one of his children, which he denies.
Then there are Haaland — the son of Alf-Inge Haaland, a former Premier League star — and Casper Ruud, whose father, Christian, was a professional tennis player. “Everyone is looking for the formula,” Warholm said. “But we need to make sure those opportunities do not depend on where you grow up or who you meet.”
Ovrebo sees a different picture. He knows there is always something of the lightning strike about history-making, record-breaking talent: some special, unpredictable blend of inner drive and external influence that sets an athlete on a path to greatness. Yet he argues that Norway has created the right conditions for the thunderclap.
“The system is not why athletes are good,” he said. “But there is an environment where lots of people know the basic things to do to develop athletes. In an ideal world, talent just happens. What we have done is create an ecology that allows it to happen.”
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