Gavin and Allison fall down, World Championships edition

Gavin and Allison Fall Down is a recurring series where we try Norwegian winter sports and recount our shortcomings for your amusement.

Previous editions: curling, ski jumping, bobsledding, cross country skiing, dogsledding, short-track speed skating: Allison and Gavin, short-track speed skating: Annalise

Trondheim is abuzz with the biggest thing that could possibly happen to this town – the nordic skiing world championships are coming. For those unfamiliar, “nordic skiing” refers to any discipline where the toe is connected to the ski but the heel is not; this includes cross-country skiing, ski jumping, and Nordic Combined. The events take place over 10 days at Granåsen Idrettspark (Feb 26-Mar 9), a winter sports arena just south of Trondheim.

This is the Super Bowl of Norway. Over the course of the last year, the city has been practicing the bus logistics (there was an open call for people to volunteer to be practice bus riders, which … I guess that’s one way to spend a Saturday), advertising the event (I encountered a not-gregarious-enough mascot at the airport, just kind of sadly waving a flag by themselves in the corner), making snow, and building a lot of infrastructure in the ski stadium. This infrastructure includes temporary stands, advertising boards, warming tents, tents for TV and other electronics, a children’s place space and even a new on-site grocery store.

For a Norwegian skier, a world championship on home snow is probably the biggest race of their career, including the Olympics. Multiple people have come out of retirement to try and make the team. This year’s expected favorites are Trondheim native and hair gel company owner Johannes Høsflot Klæbo,

and formerly-retired GOAT and clothing line owner Therese Johaug.

As a result, the ski stadium is a bit of a weird scene. On one hand, the elite skiers are all training on the course for this high-pressure event. On the other hand, it’s publicly accessible, and is being skied by everyone from competitive skiers of all levels, amateurs, elementary schools, and … us. There aren’t many opportunities in American sports to just casually share a training space with the very best in the sport, but spend any time at all at the ski stadium and you’ll get toasted by a Didrik Tønseth or Jørgen Graabak (a Nordic Combined skier who, by the way, has his car painted with the Norwegian colors and his name on the driver’s door like it’s a fighter jet. Its swaggering effect is somewhat diminished by the fact that it is a two-door hatchback).

The Opening Ceremony is set and has been billed as “the greatest opening ceremony of all time, featuring Oddvar Brå, Fargespill, Gunnhild Sundli, Marja Mortensson, and 360 cultural performers across Trøndelag” (the greater-Trondheim region).

For Valentine’s Day, Allison and I went on a ski date to Granåsen. After our ski, since we were there anyway, we took the opportunity to lay down a time on the sprint course. The course is about .9 miles long, and we expect it will be raced in about 2 minutes 30 seconds. To help you calibrate, here’s highlights of the most recent sprint race in Sweden this weekend:

You’ll notice that a fast hot start is important, something you’ll easily recognize in this thrilling video of my start:

Downhills on cross country skis are scary, but it is important to attack and get as much free speed as possible from them. To that end, the course has a very steep section, and I lined up to capture Allison’s thrilling descent. She instead took an unorthodox approach of… declining to participate.

Fortunately, I did capture her aggressive path down the downhill she did eventually choose.

As you can probably guess, our times were not that close to the 2:30 we expect from the pros. Allison did it in about 11 minutes, and I did it in about 8. Of course, if you don’t have the data, it didn’t happen.

The pros will see if they can beat us on February 27. We have tickets, and outfits we are confident will get us on TV. You can watch in the US on skiandsnowboard.live.