In Ingebrigtsen's Norway, an all-season, holistic sports push

Last month, a contingent of 200-odd Norwegian athletes and coaches assembled in the Spanish island of Gran Canaria for a camp.

- Rutvick Mehta

MUMBAI: It featured the country's prospects for next year's Milano Cortina Winter Olympics from across all disciplines except biathlon.

This all-encompassing huddled base may only have been for athletes' basic training, but the model of cross-functional knowledge sharing is fairly unique to Norway and how sports federations operate in the country of 5.5 million. "This model will not work in all countries, given the scale. It's unique to Norway, a sort of hub that brings athletes together and gets them to interact and learn from one another," Tore Ovrebo, sports director at Olympiatoppen, told HT. Olympiatoppen is the Norwegian Sports Federation's elite sports programme responsible for Norway's Olympics and Paralympics performance.

The model not only ensured that Norway walked away as the top-performing nation from the last three Winter Games, but also with double the medals from the Summer Olympics of 2021 Tokyo and 2024 Paris (8 each) compared to 2016 Rio (4). The gold count spiked from nil in Rio to four each in Tokyo and Paris.

Eight medals are by no means eye-catching. Yet for a country with greater pedigree at the Winter Games, finishing as the 18th best nation at Paris is noteworthy. India, for context, were 71st with six medals.