Hot take: Johannes Høsflot Klæbo is more talented than any Ingebrigtsen, or any other runner

No

asdfasd wrote:

The strength, speed, endurance, lactate threshold, and recovery needed to do something like that are far beyond the abilities of any currently competing elite runner.

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Nonsense. Runners just apply the exact same principles to a different discipline.

Bekele showed this over rolling CC courses.

asdfasd wrote:

If Johannes Høsflot Klæbo had taken up track instead of xc skiing, he would be the current world champion in the 1500m. With the possibility of getting the world record in the next 2 to 3 years.

Watching him literally run up a steep hill on xc skis in the final of a sprint event (the 4th race of a typical sprint day) is amazing. Both classic and freestyle. The strength, speed, endurance, lactate threshold, and recovery needed to do something like that are far beyond the abilities of any currently competing elite runner.

He's better off in xc skiing. He'll make more money there, and also have many more opportunities to compete. A typical track season of 10 races for a pro (less if you're in a certain american group) hardly seems like an actual season, let alone sporting career.

+1000

asdfasd wrote:

If Johannes Høsflot Klæbo had taken up track instead of xc skiing, he would be the current world champion in the 1500m. With the possibility of getting the world record in the next 2 to 3 years.

Watching him literally run up a steep hill on xc skis in the final of a sprint event (the 4th race of a typical sprint day) is amazing. Both classic and freestyle. The strength, speed, endurance, lactate threshold, and recovery needed to do something like that are far beyond the abilities of any currently competing elite runner.

He's better off in xc skiing. He'll make more money there, and also have many more opportunities to compete. A typical track season of 10 races for a pro (less if you're in a certain american group) hardly seems like an actual season, let alone sporting career.

Dug this up

Well, he's been probably the most dominant athlete in the world for a long time. It was obvious way back in PyeongChang 2018 with the so-called Klaebo-bakken.

As the OP described all those years ago, Klaebo's climbing ability is surreal. Other cross country skiers can look awesome with the powerful explosive rapid climbing. You think they have to be the best in the world. Then Klaebo makes them look like they're backpedalling.

He's certainly far more dominant than Duplantis or Marchand or Sydney, just to name a few.

I should have added that Klaebo can have an occasional defeat only because he contests everything, from the short sprint all the way to 50km. Ridiculous range. If he stuck solely with the sprint he'd never lose other other than boredom. Early career the cynics doubted his distance ability. There were some Russians who could beat him, plus Niskanen of Finland.

Klaebo has steadily made distance a strength. The 60km is the last event on the card in Milan. There will be huge spotlight on Klaebo in that event if he wins all the preceding ones, as expected.

typo 50km not 60km

It would be awesome if he just dropped into a 5k or 10k race just to see. It's not like he would have to learn a new sport in order to try it. Without specific training I wouldn't be surprised if he could break 13:15 or 27:45. With a year of specific training he could probably beat most top pros. His aerobic talent is beyond most other humans not named Todej Pogacar.

He is a bit big to be an elite 5k or 10k runner. I bet he could run high 29s right now, and probably get down to low 28s or high 27s with more specific training. I would love to see him do an Ironman. I bet he could compete in the pro field pretty quickly if he has any swimming ability.

I don't think you understand. Every Norwegian child wants to become a skier. It is like Americans and their NBA or NFL. In fact, the Ingebrigtsens started their athletic career skiing.
One of the reasons that Norway hasn't had top tier athletics in the past years is that the best athletes go for skiing. Of course, Johannes is extremely strong and the best skier Norway has ever seen, but translating that to the track is impossible.

Love watching xc skiing and Klæbo is great but running is an international sport with competitors from all over the world. Xc skiing draws from a smaller pool, not as deep competition and more likely someone can be an outlier. A more accurate analogy is Klæbo is like Jakob or Kerr/Hocker. A great but with deeper competition would lose sometimes. He also is not built like a runner he is big but perfect for skiing.

begs the question. He has twice as many wins as the entire field combined and is still young. He walks away with victories easily, seemingly fresh as a daisy when everyone else is cashed.. But since its XC skiing he is not sus?

Don't forget that in 2025 Klaebo won every single event at the world champs. From the sprint to the 50k! 6 golds!

I believe he's the only truly top-tier athlete in XC skiing right now. He's equivalent to Pogacar, Evenpoel, van der Poel, Hocker, Kiplimo, Jakob (when healthy), Blumenfelt and some more I'm missing. Those are all at the absolute top of what a conditioned human can achieve. Both in talent and race performance. Watching the sprint Klaebo made everyone else look silly. Just like Pogacar does when he feels like it, or van der Poel in cyclocross.

It's cool the US guy got second, but talent pool in XC skiing is so shallow you can take someone who would have been like a 9:20 guy in HS and get him a medal through years of work (no shade, that's the whole point of training).

We'll never know what Klaebo could have done had he picked track, but I think it's safe to say he'd be one of the top middle distance runners in the world.

I love the dude and that was crazy to watch him running up that hill but I don't think the chances are strong that he's a better endurance athlete than Jakob.

I don't have highly accurate stats to back this, but a quick Google search yields results of around 600M+ people participate in running the world annually vs 200M+ in all forms of skiing. Basically, I'm trying to boil this down to 3x (minimum) the competition in running, probably way higher. I consider Jakob to be like the Steph Curry of distance running. He changed the game. And to do that in a sport that has been widely contested for like-a-gazillion-years is incredibly unlikely, almost unfathomable.

Athletics (running) is accessible by just about anybody in the world. How many East African dudes have attempted cross country skiing? I'm not saying that East Africa is the center of the endurance universe. But the top XC skiers don't even have to worry about them. Yeah, East Africans have been losing distance events in track in recent years, but they still dominate cross country.

What could you do with someone who would have been like an 8:40 guy in HS?

It was interesting to watch that videos make the rounds yesterday and how it seemed to breakthrough with the normies. The visual of a guy on skis going uphill at the speed was enough for non-anthletes to at least somewhat understand the effort involved. Whereas you have some running a marathon at 4:45 pace, but because his stride looks so effortless, I don't think the average person has any idea how fast or hard he's running.

It's always been the frustrating part of getting the non-running public to comprehend how incredible our best distance runners are. The better they are, the easier they make it look, and that just doesn't translate visually.

How did Jakob change the game?

What’s he on? He’s on his skis 6 hours per day.