Plenty of strong candidates have emerged for the title of Most Memorable Scene from Milano-Cortina 2026, including a wolfdog in full sprint and a filthy exchange between curling teams.
For many of us, the lasting signature image will be Johannes Høsflot Klæbo simply shattering his competitors with cartoonish uphill surges like this:
Sub-six-minute mile pace uphill on skis: #WinterOlympics SPEED. 🔥 pic.twitter.com/trof9rs4zf
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) February 10, 2026
Klæbo has owned these Olympics in an unprecedented way, winning six gold medals in cross-country skiing, including the men's 50km mass start on Saturday. It is a towering and silly achievement. He is now the only athlete to have won double-digit golds in the winter games. Klæbo may very well be the GOAT of GOATs, Olympically speaking.
(No, Klæbo isn't particularly close to Michael Phelps' absurd individual medal count, but the nature of his sport does not allow such things. There's no winter equivalent to swimming's five-different-ways-to-travel-200-meters. Eye-roll.)
"I'm starting to believe maybe he is a machine," said Norway's Martin Løwstrøm Nyenget, silver medalist at 50km and bronze medalist in skiathlon.
We honestly can't rule it out. Klæbo is shockingly disciplined, even by the standards of ultra-elite athletes. His lifestyle in the weeks and months ahead of important events border on asceticism, as The Athletic's Jacob Whitehead recently reported:
Before his six gold medals at the Trondheim world championships, Klæbo shut himself away. He only saw family members who were directly involved in his training programme, such as Kare and his father, Haakon, and limited the time he spent with his girlfriend. In a bid to avoid sickness, he did not go out for dinner once.
Basically, Klæbo exists at the intersection of flawless training and technique, unrelatable personal discipline, and outrageous aerobic capacity. Again, we cannot have the GOAT of GOATs conversation without this man.
A few months down the road, when ESPN and/or SI attempts to tell you that some golfer or quarterback was the athlete/sportshuman of the year, please remember that, in fact, Klæbo emphatically settled the matter in February.
