What type of events does a high VO2Max benefit the most?

Vo2max training takes a high toll on your body and requires a lot of recovery. That's why people often train at/below threshold instead.

High vo2max is good for 1500-5k, but there are so many more factors than vo2max that goes into winning races.

I assume you mean in the context of Ironman training. There is a tradeoff between producing the most possible energy v.s. producing energy efficiently. For a 3k race that takes ~7 minutes, you basically want to consume as much O2 as possible and get as large as an output as possible. For an Ironman race that takes ~7 hours, it is better if your engine is more efficient and doesn't consume as many calories, since there is a limit to how quickly your body can replenish them.

Nordic skiing. More active muscle requires more O2 delivery/utilization.

Your absolute VO2 max is determined by basic health and genetics. Cross country skiers tend to have the highest VO2 max because the sport is suited to such high oxygen uptake. Endurance cyclists have slightly lower but still very high VO2 max and endurance runners are somewhat lower.

So typical numbers for male elite athletes in those three sports arev

XC Skiing 85 ml/kg/min

Endurance cyclists 80 ml/kg/min

Endurance runners 70 ml/kg/min

For running, VO2 max pace is roughly the pace you could run at for an all out effort of 8-10 minutes, so events that are within that range or a little on either side of it will benefit from having a high VO2 max. I think most people who understand the science would say this means 1500m - 10,000m, though there are other factors that also have high influence at 1500m and 10,000m (say max sprint speed for elite 1500m runners and lactate threshold for 10,000m runners).

VO2 max training might be called "expensive" because it is grueling work and not stuff any runner should be doing a ton of. It will also erode your lactate threshold ability if you do too much of it. This is important because science has shown that lactate threshold is actually the single most important factor in distance running over a very wide range of distances, part of why Lydiard's athletes did so well, even the shorter distance ones.

So why do XC skiers have a much higher VO2 max than runners? Let's see if you can figure it out?

Is this a serious question? XC skiiers have the highest VO2 maxes because xc skiing is very similar to running only the upper body is involved much more than running, so it's more like a complete body aerobic exercise (more oxygen demand), whereas running is mostly a lower body aerobic exercise. Total body aerobic exercise demands more oxygen and will lead to more aerobic physiological adaptations in the upper body which will allow increased utilization of O2.

I think this is spelled out pretty clearly in Tim Noakes' Lore of Running... It's been nearly 20 years since I read his 4th edition though.

No. XC skiers have a naturally higher VO2max than runners. This has been known for over 50 years. It has nothing to do with "Total body aerobic exercise demands" and everything to do with genetics. They were born that way.

I assume you're probably trolling, but just in case... VO2max measurements are activity-specific. The same XC skier will measure higher in a roller-ski test than in a treadmill (running) test, and yes, it's because their arms are utilizing oxygen in addition to their legs.

Then runners should measure higher than cyclists since more muscles are involved in running than when sitting on a bike.

vo2max can be increased via training up to 40%. Your starting point and ceiling are genetic but training matters. Having a higher vo2 in combination with running economy is an advantage in all events.
Maybe sprints being the exception, but sprinters have been known to use epo. So probably still an advantage.

Coaches in the comment were probably talking about doing training at vo2max. However you don’t need to train at this level to increase vo2. Threshold work for example.

Lance Armstrong had a vo2max of 84 apparently and he ran a sub 3 marathon!

The VO2 ceiling is genericallly determined. Why would you think I'm trolling?

Your absolute VO2 max isn't going to increase if you already have good cardiovascular health and basic fitness. There are many ways in which a test may give inaccurate results.

By RPL's flawed logic.

Of course real world measurements by real oxygen kinetics experts tell the real story.

In my opinion:

3000 > 5000 > 1500 >> 10000, 800. 3000 is a 'pure' VO2 max event, while for the rest other factors are more important (threshold for 5000, 800 speed for the mile, etc)

Here's the case report from Oskar Svendsen, the Norwegian cyclist with the highest VO2max reported in the peer-reviewed literature. They have his whole series of VO2max tests, starting with a 74.6 when he was a teen alpine ski racer cycling a few times a week for off-season training, progressing to 96.7 a few weeks before he won the time trial at the world junior championships, then regressing to 77.0 after he quit elite cycling and just ran recreationally for fitness. VO2max changes with training, even if you have good cardiovascular health and basic fitness.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Case Studies in Physiology: Temporal changes in determinants of aerobic performance in individual going from alpine skier to world junior champion time trial cyclist - PubMed

This paper reports temporal changes in physiological measurements of exercise performance in a young man transitioning from alpine skiing until he became a world junior champion time trial cyclist after only 3 yr of bike-spec...

Link:pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31194601/

Yes, that's true... except that for some reason it's not how things turn out in the real world. I'm not sure why that is, and scientists have various theories. It could be that because running is too hard on the body to accumulate the training hours that cyclists (and XC skiers) do, runners don't max out all the available adaptations (like capillarization). It could be that the greatest runners in world (primarily from East Africa) haven't spent a lot of time in labs doing treadmill tests, so we have a falsely low expectation for what an "elite" value for runners is. I don't know!

That said, there are studies that compare exercises using different amounts of muscle, and it's clear that you can push VO2 higher with more muscle. Push yourself to exhaustion doing, say, hand cycling, and you'll have a very low VO2max.

Cyclists do in fact use more muscles. They use quads, hamstrings, glutes, hip flexors, and calf muscles to produce power.

Runners just use hamstrings and glutes mainly to produce power.

Runners of course still need their quads and hip flexors and calf muscles, but these muscles just serve auxiliary purposes (swinging your legs forward, providing elastic energy return when your foot hits the ground) rather than serving as power producing muscles like they do in cycling.