Norway’s Therese Johaug celebrates winning gold in the women’s 30km mass start cross-country event at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. Photo by Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images
Idrettsgallaen 2023, the Norwegian equivalent of Britain’s Sportsman of the Year award, took place in Hamar’s Olympic Hall on 7 January and by all accounts the mood was even more festive than usual. The past year has been one of the most remarkable in Norwegian sporting history , and so, in addition to the distribution of the usual prizes, it was a moment to celebrate and admire the view from the summit.
At the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, Norway won 16 gold medals, beating the record for any nation at a single winter game. Erling Braut Haaland and Ada Hegerberg are two of the greatest footballers in the world. Martin Odegaard is the captain of Premier League leaders Arsenal. Casper Ruud is the second best male tennis player in the world, reaching both the US Open and French Open finals last year. Viktor Hovland came third in the world golf rankings. Magnus Carlsen is one of the greatest chess players in history. The Norwegians are currently world champions in sports as diverse as weightlifting, Ironman triathlon, beach volleyball and time trials.
By any nation’s standards, that would be an impressive list of sporting achievements. And yet this is a country of just five million people, and one that freezes over much of the year. “It’s cool to be Norwegian last year,” said Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Olympic 1,500m champion and world 5,000m champion, who accepted the award for Male Athlete of the Year. “Per capita, we need to be the highest quality nation.” It’s worth asking exactly what’s going on here, if there’s anything concrete to learn from Norway’s golden generation. By “learned” I’m not referring to the narrow, clinical lessons found in the discourse of high-performance sport: the language of PowerPoint presentations and elite task forces. Because the more you delve into the Norwegian success story and how the country has developed into a sports culture, the more interesting it becomes.
The natural reflex is to point out that Norway is a wealthy European nation with ample resources to pour into its sports infrastructure. But that alone explains nothing; Ireland, a country with a similar population and GDP, has a comparatively small global sporting footprint. Also, Norway has been prosperous for decades, and yet if you look at Idrettsgallaen’s shortlists of the 2000s, they were generally of skiers and biathletes, brave bronze medalists and the odd middle-class Premier League footballer like John Carew or Claus Lundekvam populated.
But of course money helps if you know where to spend it. And while nations like China and Britain have funneled overwhelming resources into the elite end of the pyramid, sports policy in Norway is seen as a joint enterprise in culture, education and public health. Government funding is focused on grassroots participation and particularly the local clubs and volunteer organizations that provide most children with their first sporting experience. When you buy a lottery ticket, you can donate a portion of the proceeds to your local sports club. Perhaps this explains why around 80 percent of children between the ages of six and twelve take part in at least one sporting activity.
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With that comes a certain vision of the sport that sets Norway apart from many of its international competitors. It’s called idrettsglede – literally “the joy of sport”. In Norway, organized sports teams cannot earn points until participants are 13 years old: this means there are no goals or rankings. Coaches are not allowed to tell young athletes how much they weigh if it causes an eating disorder. Children are not pushed too early to specialize in a single sport. Erling Haaland grew up running, skiing and handball. “We want to leave the kids alone,” Tore Øvrebø, Norway’s director of elite sport, told Time magazine. “They learn a lot from playing, from not being afraid, not being counted, not being judged … And they tend to stay longer.”
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Norway’s Idrettsglede could hardly contradict Britain’s modern view of the sport. For decades, successive governments have invested heavily in the Olympic sport while slowly downsizing the underlying system, selling out pitches and stunted state school sports. Women’s sport was despised if it didn’t “pay the bills”. This was essentially sport viewed through a cynical commercial lens: not something you do but something you pay for, not a vehicle of personal pleasure but an entertainment product.
Norwegian sport is far from perfect. Even in the midst of the gold rush, caution is being talked about focusing on excellence. Rising costs have hit local sports clubs hard and raised entry barriers for the poorest. The lack of diversity on the shortlists has sparked a debate over whether Norwegian sport is less inclusive than it likes to imagine. The issue of ensuring access for all is “a major democratic task ahead of us”, according to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.
And yet it feels exhilarating, almost apostate, to hear a prime minister talk about sport like that from across the sea. We are so often told in this country that sport as a public good and sport as a mass entertainment product are two opposite poles. Norway’s track record reminds us that they don’t have to be.
[See also: Why I will remember the day of the 2022 World Cup final, forever]
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