As the runners round the penultimate bend, the music begins to pulse. The choice and timing is perfect: Darde's now-old-fashioned trance tune, “Sandstorm,” but few in the 15,000 crowd can hear it.
Instead, the fans at Oslo's Bislet Stadium were on their feet, cheering and roaring their support as Norwegian long-distance superstar Jacob Ingebrigtsen tried desperately to hold off Kenya's Timothy Cheruiyot in the climax of the main event, the 1,500 meters.
Ingebrigsen, sensing the desperation of the crowd, gave it her all, and finally took both feet off the ground, dived forward, and crossed the finish line ahead of her rivals. There was a moment of silence. Ingebrigsen's name appeared on the screen as the winner. The stadium shook with commotion.
The Bislett Meet, Norway's athletics extravaganza, has been a highlight of the country's sporting calendar for more than half a century, but it has long been dominated by foreign athletes, with organisers once paying Usain Bolt a significant portion of the appearance fee to attract the event.
Now the stars are emerging from within: Norway, a country of just 5.5 million people traditionally associated with skiing and skating sports, has suddenly become a country boasting year-round sporting excellence.
In Paris, Norway will be hoping that Ingebrigsen (from Sandnes in the southwest) and hurdling star Karsten Warholm (born in the fjords of the west coast) will both win gold medals, but thanks to a combination of money, time, thought and maybe a little luck, they will be just two of the jewels in Norway's crown.
Norway is also home to four of the world's best soccer players – Premier League stars Erling Haaland and Martin Odegaard, and Champions League winners Ada Hegerberg and Caroline Graham Hansen – as well as leaders in tennis (Kasper Ruud) and golf (Viktor Hovland).
These last two are part of Norway's team at the Paris Olympics, where the country has medal hopes in a variety of sports, including handball, beach volleyball and various shooting events. If chess were an Olympic sport, Norway's greatest sports star, Magnus Carlsen, would probably win gold as well.
It's a little-known story, but it's still remarkable in Norway. “It's a story that gets talked about a lot,” says four-time Olympian distance runner Caroline Bjelkeri-Glovdal. People mostly talk about how it happened, and whether it can be replicated again.
Time and money
Tore Obrebo, director of Norway's elite sports program, has an allegory to explain how Norway achieved this success: It's set on the country's west coast, involves three shrimp-fishing brothers, and has a strong resemblance to Nordic folklore.
He said that every year the brothers compete against each other to see who can catch the biggest haul – the one with the best idea or best technique will bring home the most shrimp.
“At the end of the season, they come back, share their knowledge and do it again,” he said. “The next year, another brother might be No. 1. So now, many years later, they're way ahead of any other team in the world.”
This is how Norway's elite sports program works, he says: “Our main goal is to beat all the non-Norwegian speakers,” he says. “There are a lot of them, and they're in a hurry. So we cooperate when we can cooperate, and compete when we have to compete. Good slogan, right?”
True, but it's not just a slogan. The day before the Bislett tournament, hundreds of Norwegian coaches gathered for a conference at the Norwegian School of Sport Science, furiously taking notes as their colleagues presented on topics such as developing talent in handball and how to engage with Gen Z athletes.
This mutual growth began in the 1980s, when Norway was in a sporting slump, according to Matti-Erik Goksoyil, a professor of sports history at the university. Norway was also struggling in winter sports, but was still planning to host the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer in 1994, and the country's top sports organizations had to act.
But the real driving force was money: at about the same time, Norway was experiencing an oil boom that made it one of the richest countries in the world.
“It felt like we had more money,” Goksoyil said, and investment from the state, businesses and the local community has led to “more coaches, more professionalism, more support for players, better equipment.”
But above all, Norway has been able to capitalize on its position as a place with “high sporting legitimacy,” Obrebo says: 93 percent of Norwegians participate in some sport, be it beach volleyball or Nordic skiing, by the time they turn 25. The country's wealth means it has not only the sports facilities but also the people to provide instruction and transportation.
“In most families, both parents work eight hours a day,” Ovrebo says, “which means they have the time to spend with their kids or volunteer as a coach. If you're working 16 hours a day to survive, you don't have that time.”
The philosophy is to keep the sport open to everyone for as long as possible — “At the elite level, things are very, very, very professional,” Ovrebo says — but before that, the focus is on player retention.
He said participants are not encouraged to keep score until they are 13. Regardless of ability, children are encouraged to continue with the sport.
“Big countries are so preoccupied with selection and exclusion,” Obrebo said. Norway gives children who are “developing slower or whose parents haven't been able to support them” the time to discover their potential, he said.
“Most kids will never become international champions, but they will still feel that the years they spent in sport were a positive asset,” he added.
These synergies mean that Norway, despite its relatively small population, is by no means a small country when it comes to sport: “The talent pool is huge,” Obrebo says.
A chance connection
Warholm is a prime example of Norwegian success: an Olympic gold medallist and three-time world champion in the 400m hurdles, he looks like he was born for the spotlight today.
Before the race in Bislett, he paced near the starting blocks in lane seven, slapping his thighs and shaking his chest as the stadium roared in anticipation. Later, in spite of losing in a photo finish to Brazil's Alison dos Santos, he was in high spirits and demonstrated to an Australian television crew that he could open beer bottles with the hooks on the backs of his spikes.
But the details of his story testify to the validity of the Norwegian approach: Warholm grew up in a small village on the western edge of Norway, and he attributes his rise to fame to a meeting with Leif Olav Alnes, a somewhat grizzled and experienced coach who was contemplating retirement when Warholm approached him.
Alness agreed to “work hard” and not just serve as an advisor. Their relationship was so fruitful, and so fascinating, that they ended up co-starring in their own documentary. “If I had never met Leaf, I never would have done the world record,” Warholm said.
Looking around Norwegian sport, he sees much the same picture, and he quickly realises that, despite all the systems, seminars and knowledge sharing, there are many coincidences in the careers of Norway's best athletes.
Ingebrigtsen comes from a family of runners and was well-known even before he turned professional thanks to the documentary series “Team Ingebrigtsen,” which detailed how his father trained him and his brothers.
The show was a hit in Norway, but the family broke up last year after Jacob and his siblings accused their father, Gert, of using “physical violence and intimidation as part of their upbringing”. Gert Ingebrigsen has since been accused of physically abusing one of his children, charges he denies.
Then there's Haaland, the son of former Premier League star Alf-Inge Haaland, and Kasper Ruud, whose father Christian was a professional tennis player. “Everyone's looking for the formula,” Warholm says. “But you need to make sure those opportunities aren't dictated by where you grow up or who you meet.”
Ovrebo sees it differently. He knows there's something thunderous about the talent that makes history and breaks records — that special, unpredictable blend of inner drive and outside influences that sets athletes on the path to greatness. But he argues that Norway has created the right conditions for that thunder to happen.
“Athletes don't excel because of a system,” he says, “but because of an environment where a lot of people know what to do to develop them. In an ideal world, talent comes naturally. What we've done is created an environment where that can happen.”
