Norway is dominating these Winter Olympics with a unique approach to sports

Dan Wolken | USA TODAY

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PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — They’re not here to gloat. The Norwegians, in fact, will go out of their way to tell you that there’s still a long way to go at these Olympics before they reach their goals and win the overall medal count. They’re also not here to tell anyone (like the struggling U.S. team; cough, cough) how to go about their business or impose their Norwegian societal values, which they believe are directly tied into the success of their winter sports development.

“We’re not a gorilla beating its chest,” said Tore Ovrebo, the Norwegian Olympic Committee’s director of elite sports. “We know it can change very quickly. We have to work hard.”

But from an American perspective, let’s be real about this: Norway is kicking our red, white and blue rear ends here in Pyeongchang. And we’re not the only ones.

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Norway, which is always among the best nations at the Winter Games despite having roughly the same population as the Detroit metropolitan area, is on track to win at an unprecedented level this year with 26 medals and nine golds, practically matching their all-time best performance as the host country in 1994. Barring a major drought the rest of the way, Norway is likely going to meet its pre-Olympic goal of 30 and run away with the medal count.

Apparently being No. 1 in the United Nations’ Human Development Index last year wasn’t good enough for Norway. Now they want to beat your brains on the ski slopes, too.

“Now we have 26 and that’s our historically best medal count,” Ovrebo said. “We had 26 in Lillehammer in '94 which was a home game and we got 26 in Sochi, but this time we thought we had to raise the bar because sports are in a very good condition and we thought as a nation we were better than 26 and we want to deliver more.”

They’re delivering, all right. The question is how.

And ironically, for a country that’s been winning everything here, Ovrebo believes much of the success traces back to its disregard for the scoreboard with younger athletes.

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Unlike the U.S., where we keep score of everything all the time, Norway puts kids in sports but doesn’t let them keep score until age 13. The idea is to make sports part of their social development so that the motivation to stay involved is to have fun with their friends, not winning.

Eventually, of course, the Norwegians introduce competition and the most advanced sports science techniques they can develop to pump out their medal-hoarding biathletes, skiers and ski jumpers. But the idea, Ovrebo said, isn’t to have the highest-ranked 10-year-old athletes in the world but rather the most mature adults.

“A huge amount of Norwegian kids are doing sports, so we have very broad recruiting base, and our top sports programs and our kids are very closely connected in our system,” Ovrebo said. “They can compete, but we don’t make like No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 before they’re in their 13th year. We think it’s better to be a child in this way because then they can concentrate on having fun and be with their friends and develop. We think the biggest motivation for the kids to do sports that they do it with their friends and they have fun while they’re doing it and we want to keep that feeling throughout their whole career.”

And fun remains a key tent of the Norwegian experience even when they grow up, which is important since, as Ovrebo acknowledges, “it’s not a very competitive society from the start.” In other words, Norway doesn’t look at sports as an avenue to fame and fortune, nor is it an escape from their troubles. Because most Norwegians, it turns out, don’t have many troubles given the universal health care, free college education and high employment rates.

“We have quite a high level of life quality for a very high percentage of the people and that puts them in a position where they can actually choose sports as a kind of self-realization and development arena,” Ovrebo said. “They’re not struggling for their lives, so they’re quite free and quite educated and have good health state. That means many of the youth are actually in a position where they can choose sports.”

And if that isn’t utopia-ish enough for you, get this: Even when the athletes grow up and start competing for big trophies, they remain friends. Not made-for-TV-and-Twitter friends, but, like, real friends. Among the other things Norway encourages is for the sports and coaches to get out of their silos and talk to each other and learn from each other.

“We go abroad as a big team that wants to have fun, and we should be even better friends when we come back home than when we leave Norway,” Ovrebo said. “We also have a very high ambition for results. So it’s those three elements that we really want to succeed in: Fun, friendships and medals.”

Ovrebo doesn’t want to come across as though he’s being critical of any other country, or that the Norwegian approach is best for any other country than Norway. He also acknowledges that the country’s plentiful snow and many months of cold weather have something to do with becoming so good at winter sports as opposed to summer, where they rarely reach double-digits in medals.

“We want to be better at summer sports because there are lots of kids doing summer sports but they don’t have the same natural advantages, and the funding is much lower for their sports,” Ovrebo said. “But if they’re not funded, they die. We’re really working hard on that piece.”

Though government support for the national Olympic committee all goes into the same financial pot, the marketing money and sponsorships are much stronger for skiing and biathlon, so those tend to attract the best athletes. Hey, even a little powerhouse like Norway can’t overachieve in everything.