A Grandfather's Skis, Six Gold Medals

Kåre Høsflot is 83 years old. He's a retired PE teacher from Trondheim who used to race cross-country skis. On Christmas morning, when his grandson Johannes was two, Kåre gave the boy a pair of skis. Johannes spent the rest of the day skiing across the living room floor. That was 1998. Twenty-eight years later, that kid just won six gold medals at a single Winter Olympics — more than any athlete in history.

Johannes Høsflot Klæbo swept every men's cross-country event at Milan-Cortina 2026. The skiathlon. The 10km freestyle. The sprint classic. The team sprint. The relay. And on February 21, in Tesero, the 50km mass start classic — the final medal event of the entire Games. He finished in 2:07:07.1, seventeen and a half seconds ahead of his own teammate. Eric Heiden's record of five golds at a single Winter Olympics, set in speed skating at Lake Placid in 1980, had stood for 46 years. Klæbo broke it and kept going.

Johannes Høsflot Klæbo on the podium in Trondheim — the sprinter who would go on to sweep all six men's cross-country events at Milan-Cortina 2026, breaking Eric Heiden's 46-year-old record for most golds at a single Winter Olympics.© Stein Langørgen, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

But here's the part of the story that matters more than the medals: Kåre never stopped coaching him. When Johannes turned 15, his grandfather became his personal coach — designing training plans, analyzing race data, traveling to World Cup events. They bond over fishing trips and long runs together. An 83-year-old former PE teacher and the most dominant Winter Olympian alive, still working as a team. Kåre gave him his first skis. Then he gave him everything else.

The Klæbo family runs like a small company, and everyone has a role. Father Haakon manages Johannes's career. Mother Elisabeth handles the finances. Brother Ola runs media. After Johannes won his fourth gold in Milan, Haakon told FasterSkier, "We're just having fun." That's either the most Norwegian thing anyone has ever said, or the most accurate description of what it looks like when a family builds something together over decades.

Klæbo celebrates with teammates Emil Iversen and others at the 2019 World Championships in Seefeld — Iversen, now 34, would later set the pace in the closing kilometers of the 50km at Milan-Cortina before Klæbo surged past him for gold number six.© Granada, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Pernille Døsvik is Johannes's fiancée — a Trondheim native who finished her master's in civil engineering and marine technology at NTNU. They met in 2018, after Johannes liked one of her Instagram photos. They got engaged in June 2025 at their cabin in Skeikampen. After his sixth gold, Klæbo told Olympics.com: "I have a very supportive family and fiancée. Together we're making the right choices and the result of that is six gold medals."

The team around him was stacked. Einar Hedegart, 24, had been a biathlete until three months before the Olympics — he switched to cross-country in November 2025 and promptly won team sprint gold alongside Klæbo, relay gold, and a 10km freestyle bronze at his Olympic debut. Martin Løwstrøm Nyenget won 10km freestyle gold on his own and took silver behind Klæbo in the 50km. Emil Iversen, 34, a veteran World Cup racer and 2019 World Champion, set the pace in the closing kilometers of the 50km before Klæbo surged past. Norway swept the podium: Klæbo, Nyenget, Iversen. Then Norway topped the overall medal table.

They call Klæbo the Usain Bolt of cross-country skiing. Born in Oslo in 1996, raised in Trondheim from age five, he represents Byåsen IL and now holds 11 career Olympic golds and 13 total medals. Only Michael Phelps, with 23 golds, sits above him on the all-time list. After the 50km, he said: "It's hard to find the words. It's unbelievable. After the world champs last year, we knew that it was possible, but to be able to do it — it's hard to find the right words."

Eric Heiden is a physician in Utah now. He set his five-gold record at Lake Placid when he was 21 years old, in speed skating, and nobody touched it for nearly half a century. Records are made to be broken, but 46 years is a long time to be the answer to a trivia question. Heiden earned that record on his own legs. Klæbo earned his the same way — except he had an 83-year-old grandfather drawing up the training plans.

Kåre Høsflot bought a pair of Christmas skis for a two-year-old. The two-year-old skied across the living room all day. Everything else followed from that.