you will find 25 articles that incorporate the word "enclave" on the main site, most are by me, and most are used with this concept in mind.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

U.S. swimming is a good example also as most if not all Oly swimmers came up through the USA Swimming club system. Not sure how many clubs there are right now but prob around 300-400 spread across the U.S. with around 350-400K total club swimmers ranging from age 7 to 37. Very good swimmers at age 10 become, if they have "it", great swimmers by age 18-19. The very good absorb the stroke techniques of the great more or less by osmosis such that virtually all top swimmers have pretty similar technique. I was watching the pro men's swim start of the Wanaka half earlier and one guy stood out as clearly not having a club swimming background, 'cause his arms were kind of flailing, not turning over smoothly. A fast turnover rate does not mean flailing. :)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Top team sports in the USA, to varying degrees, are mostly minority sports in other areas of the World outside of the Americas.

If you hold a World Championship even though you are pretty much the only major country playing a sport, it still has cachet. Right?

Hi Halvard,

That Klaebo kid is incredible to watch. I saw from the WC results that he was crushing it on a world level, but I had never had the opportunity to watch him until that sprint final. The speed at which he went up that hill and opened the gap was fantastic to watch. Any idea why he is so good? Technique, Vo2, strength? All of the above? Would be interested to get more information on him as most of the articles are in Norwegian. He also seems like a really nice kid.

Thanks,

Will

I live in NH, my kids XC ski. I think the USSA should take the 10-12 states like NH, VT, ME, MT, CO, UT, WA, MN, WI, AK, MI, NY and build programs to develop skiing more carefully. In the northeast there is an organization called NENSA (New England Nordic Ski Association) that organizes clubs and races from age 5 through collegiate. They have coaching clinics, camps, races, etc to stay super organized for all ages.

My daughter is a top level HS skier and she gets to ski in four Eastern Cup races where you are skiing against all skiers from the D1 Programs like Dartmouth, Williams, St Lawrence, Colby, Bates, UVM, etc, as well as other top level high school skiers. A lot of the top high school skiers go to specific Nordic ski focused college prep schools like Stratton Mountain School, Holderness, and Dublin. Those schools have top level coaching and facilities.

As far as I know it is the only sport where a 15 year old can enter the same race, at the same time on the same course as a D1 college athlete. It is a great development program that has turned out about 1/2 of the olympic nordic team currently. If the other states with winters were half as organized we would be much further ahead in this obscure sport.

Is this approach to sports really why Norway is dominating? Seems like a lot of bullshit. I can buy any or all combinations of the benefits of a sports enclave, great training techniques, great coaching, doping, etc. I fail to see how not keeping score until 13 is THE reason why Norway is dominating.

Finland used to be able to compete in the xc disciplines. Then in 2001 the ski-federation based doping program was exposed and most of the national team caught (in the home world championship games, nonetheless, at least shows the program was not likely state run).

Since then it has never even been close. Now Norwegian ski federation (and fans) protects and argue even for their caught dopers (Sundby, Johaugg), many members of which hold major positions in the international federation etc.

Even as bright eyed as I am, hard not to be skeptical.

Wasn’t one of the big names from Norway busted ages ago? Like 90s or early 00s? I might be getting confused but remember someone big getting busted

Not a clever response, B. McMaster. In Canada we have 7 times more people than Norway and as much snow and hills and they are blowing us out of the snowbank with their performance. I wonder how much of their success is promotion of skiing, ski jumping, etc., from school and club programs that place such high emphasis on these sports? The best athletes in Canada tend to gravitate towards hockey at an early age.

Doesn't your response prove my point.

Canada has snow and cold but a large portion of your population doesn't give a sh-t about a lot of these sports.

We do all those sports in Canada (and fairly well). Little kids want to be Connor McDavid not Bjorn Daehlie. Success in these sports does not happen without great clubs, school programs, coaching and parents that participate in and watch the particular sport. When football eventually disappears in the U.S. there might be a shift to endurance sports. Good for Norway and good for Australia for being able to carve out their excellence in nordic sports and swimming. Nothing to do with keeping score, I feel.

You are very local in your thinking. In 2013 Dario Cologna beat Roger Federer as sportsman of the year in Switzerland.
Maybe you are not familiar with Cologna but in his market he is famous.

As far as I know, Canada just have one famous athlete - Ben Johnson...............

What are you talking about?? What does Switzerland have to do with Canada?? Canada has 100’s of famous athletes...they almost all play in the NHL.

that must have been wonderful.
I was cheering in front of the TV for Diggins in the skiathlon and the 10k free, she was absolutely redlining, for two 5th places.. brutal. So happy for her and the US women..

indeed all research suggests the key to making great endurance athletes is late specialization and de-emphasizing competitiveness at early ages.
http://evolutionaryathletics.com/...-endurance-programs/
https://sportfactoryproshop.com/...ure-in-3-easy-steps/

on the unrelated question of asthma meds, it's worth noting -
1. in 2008 I could find lots of research showing absolutely no benefit for healthy athletes from albuterol/salbutamol. That hasn't changed.

2. there is strong evidence that competitive x-c skiing causes asthma.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/...1/sms.12527/abstract
"Kennedy and some colleagues recruited 18 Canadian women who were competing full-time as cross-country skiers, and surveyed their lung inflammation over the course of a season using a technique known as sputum sampling.
What the team found was that, indeed, airway inflammation and injury increased significantly over course of a season in ways that were completely unrelated from the prevalence of colds and respiratory infections. By the end of the season, the cough was affecting the women’s ability to sleep and recover."

Swimming too,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...articles/PMC4653278/
"competitive swimmers show an increase in asthma prevalence, with a mixed eosinophilic–neutrophilic airways inflammation (77, 78), epithelial damage (46), and very frequent bronchial hyperresponsiveness (79). Further, increased levels of leukotriene B4 have been reported in elite swimmers (77), supporting the hypothesis that repeated hyperventilation challenges (80) together with exposure to chlorine derivatives can contribute to a peculiar inflammation mechanism that may support the theory of a phenotype of its own for the ‘competitive swimmers’ asthma’, a syndrome that may be potentially reversible when the athlete quits the competitive activity (65, 81)."

The Fins had quite the xc ski enclave

Question, but Canada DOES keep Provincial AG records correct? What ages do those start or do they include all AG's?

Call me when you take some Norwegians and subject them to scoring when compared to another group that you don’t score, subject them all to the same training blah blah...your conclusions are internet science at its best.

My response is to original poster. The conclusion is way off base.

Reply back mainly to Halvard as I had posted this earlier in this thread. Here in Canada, we have our athletes spread over EVERY SPORT SUMMER AND WINTER. We'll end up with ~42 medals between 2016 summer and 2018 winter games. The thing about Canada is that we are pretty well spreading our athletes across every sport on the planet. We have federations for all sports here, even though Hockey is kind of a national sport, we have good federations for Rugby, for baseball, for cycling, swimmer, weight lifting, judo, etc etc etc. Fortunately our country is rich enough, large enough in population for the wealth, and diverse enough to support all sports under the sun to different degrees of success. Aside from the podium, you will find a lot of Canadians posting top 5, top 10, top 15 in Worlds and Olympics across sports....we're not just nordic skiers, or speed skaters or downhill skiers (the bulk of Norway Medals).

Great on Norway for the culture that ends up building a decent size pyramid of participants for Olympic sports that give out a ton of medals. Probably the same group of girls who in Canada go into hockey in Norway they are skiers....hockey gets you 1 medal....skiing, I lost count how many medals you can win (keep in mind in hockey you literally can only win 1 medal, whereas in XC skiing your team can win multiple individual medals in a single event).

As for "which famous athletes outside Ben Johnson"....well since we are on a triathlon forum and talking Olympic Medals, we can talk about Simon Whitfield for triathlon, we can say Steve Bauer for road cycling (he's not our only cycling medal....Alison Sydor, Linda Jackson, Brian Walton, Curt Harnett, Clara Hughes...our women's team pursuit squad in Rio etc etc) and in swimming we have a decently deep swim medal haul, but my favourite in Alex Baumann winning 200IM + 400IM gold in LA....but most people today will point to Penny Oleksiak with 5 free/fly/relay medals in Rio and in running, we had Andre DeGrasse at Rio giving Bolt a good run (literally) and pulling in 3 medals. I THINK our medal depth over time in the sports that ST is built on is half decent. Not USA deep or Germany deep, but it's OK and deeper than Norway for summer sports and our climate is much more miserable than Norway for doing summer sport....but we don't really have an excuse for not being able to compete with Norway in Nordic....they just do it better than us....culture+program+money++++

Call me when you learn how to read English. Obviously, I was asking a legit question to realAB about Canadian record keeping. So, with all due respect, where did I even mention anything about scoring and science factoids in my question? I'm not sure what you even mean by "take some Norwegians..." Where are we taking them? Blah blah blah...internet troll.

One could go further in soccer and handball which are probably 2 of the 4 most competitive sports Norway gets beaten by Iceland which has 350 ooo inhabitants.

At the same time what is undeniable is that Norway is hugely on the up in sport.
And I guess one of the reasons like UK is that in before the wintergames at home they massively invested in the sport.
Fastest marathon runner in Europe blummefeld and some very good junior results lately in triathlon. There is something moving in the right direction. They also have very good cyclists as well

Halvard,

Coming back to which sports give out a ton of medals and what sports a country builds their participation pyramid for. Last nite I was watching the women's ice hockey finals between USA and Canada. Those women are at the top of the pyramid in that sport, but under them is a massive feeder system. Most of the women in that feeder system are locked in to playing hockey. They are not skiing, they are not doing swimming, they are not doing gymnastics. Hockey is all consuming and even after age 12 girls are playing it 10 months a year. They MAY be playing soccer in the summer but that's pretty well it. Both USA and Canada end up having a big piece of the same women who could be nordic skiing 1000% focused on hockey.

I coached youth Nordic skiing for 14 years and trust me, we tried to get the girls out of hockey and figure skating because we're not idiots and know they are awesome athletes, have great coordination, and superb endurance and power. Everything you need to be a good nordic skier.

So after last night, USA and Canada each got one medal for 20ish elite athletes, any of whom if developed earlier could have been on the path for or made our nordic ski team. But there is only one medal to show for this. We're not claiming that as countries we are dominating the Olympics although we are dominating Olympic hockey. On the medal count there is only 1 medal to show for this.

This one medal is the single premier medal for women's team sports in the Olympics....but you only have 1 to show for this. Norway was not in the women's final 8 and was not in the Olympic tournament, even though Norway has the climate to do well in this sport. Countries end up picking sports that their cultures support....they may have a lot of medals to show for it, or not many.

It is too bad my country is not as nordic ski crazy as we are hockey crazy!!!! Also I really enjoyed the Norwegian men take the gold in the men's long track team pursuit. Fantastic pacing and coordination. It was really well done.

Amazing. Reportedly systematic doping by a country's federation (Norway) gets one athlete banned from the olympics yet Russia doped (realistically) all of their athletes and they get to participate. Norway needs a better IOC lobbyist so that all of their 'medicated' athletes can compete against Russian athletes.

Huzzah to the women's team sprint team! Bread and Water.

Don't forget too that Norway tends to do well because the sports in which they excel reward a high proportion of medals.

Note that there are 4 individual biathlon events for men and for women, and 3 relay events That's 9 gold medals for one sport
In cross country skiing, there are 4 individual events for men and for women and and 4 relay events. That's 12 gold medals, again for one sport.

This isn't as bad as swimming, but still...

Now compare against 2 sports that Canada is great at.
Hockey: 1 Men, 1 women
Curling: 1 Men, 1 women, 1 Mixed

Norway is great at those sports, and does well in developing its athletes, don't get me wrong. But the medal table is just a tad skewed in its favour simply because those sports reward a high number of medals.

The two largest sports for girls and boys are football/soccer and team handball.
The national women's teams in both football and handball have had international success.
The men's football team sucks. But the men's handball team is not one of the best in the world.

These are the sports that most Norwegians kids are doing.
There are not that many skiers in Norway because endurance sports are hard.

You forgot the state where one of the ladies who helped win the first USA gold in XC skiing events...MN!

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"The person on top of the mountain didn't fall there." - unkown

also rule 5