Culture

Neville's 'blue billion-pound bottle jobs' line will immortalise Chelsea's pain

Published

11 months ago

February 26, 2024

Neville's 'blue billion-pound bottle jobs' line will immortalise Chelsea's pain

Not all losses are created equal — and no defeat in football is worse than a banter one.

“In extra time, it’s been Klopp’s kids against the blue billion-pound bottle jobs,” said Sky Sports co-commentator Gary Neville, succinctly and indisputably establishing the dominant narrative of a surreal Carabao Cup final almost as soon as Virgil van Dijk’s glanced header had settled in the far corner of Djordje Petrovic’s net.

Liverpool had not just beaten Chelsea at Wembley (again), they had done so in a manner that validated the “mentality monsters” culture that Jurgen Klopp has cultivated — apparently throughout the age groups at Kirkby as well as the first team — over the last nine years, while mercilessly exposing the fatal flaws in the lavish investment project at Stamford Bridge funded by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital over the past two.

In the bowels of Wembley after the match, a despondent Mauricio Pochettino wearily assumed the task of pointing out the nuance in the narrative. “I don’t hear what he said but if you compare the age of the two groups, I think it is similar,” Chelsea’s head coach said when asked about Neville’s line. “Look, I have a good relationship with Gary. I don’t know how I can take his opinion, but I respect his opinion.

“We are a young team. Nothing to compare with Liverpool because they also finished with young players. It’s impossible to compare, and he knows that the dynamics are completely different. We were playing Liverpool and Chelsea, Chelsea and Liverpool, and I don’t think it’s fair to speak in this way.”

The youth vs experience dynamic at Wembley was not as clear-cut as Neville made out. Liverpool’s on-pitch XI had an older average age than Chelsea’s at the start of the match and at the start of extra time. Van Dijk, a 32-year-old now with 11 major trophies to his name, was the outstanding outfield player throughout and found the net with two headers worthy of winning a final, only one of which survived VAR review.

Cole Palmer is denied by Caoimhin Kelleher (Julian Finney/Getty Images)

But the counter-argument becomes hard to sustain when the other team includes two 19-year-olds, Bobby Clark and James McConnell, who have each played fewer than 10 professional games and another (Jayden Danns) who was making his second senior appearance. Chelsea undoubtedly lost to several kids; the more important question is: did they bottle it?

Chelsea showed unmistakeable signs of nerves at Wembley. Axel Disasi twice ignited Liverpool transition attacks by fumbling the ball under little pressure. Malo Gusto, usually so sure-footed, controlled passes straight out of play on several occasions. Levi Colwill booted an attempted pass out to Ben Chilwell miles upfield and had to be told to calm down by Enzo Fernandez, who played sloppy passes with startling frequency.

Further forward, Conor Gallagher wrestled with an eerily similar cocktail of bad luck and poor composure in front of goal that afflicted fellow Cobham graduate Mason Mount against the same opponents in the same stadium in 2022.

Gallagher fluffed several chances (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)

Nevertheless, as the clock ticked towards the end of 90 minutes it was Chelsea who looked likelier winners, with Cole Palmer picking apart a Liverpool team whose legs appeared to have gone. It was at this point that Klopp made a decision that arguably no other elite coach would have made: to place the fate of a major trophy in the hands of unproven youth rather than go into retreat with experience and play for penalties.

His choice transformed this Carabao Cup final into the spiritual sequel of Chelsea’s bizarre 4-1 win over nine-man Tottenham Hotspur in November: a situation where convincing victory is the only acceptable outcome and anything less brings total humiliation. Pochettino had to guide his team through 20 nervy, aimless minutes that night before they overcame the fear of looking ridiculous — of being on the receiving end of a banter loss — and got on with winning the game.

Klopp’s own “it’s just who we are, mate” moment seemed to sink Chelsea into a similar mental crisis at Wembley that lasted for most of extra time, compounded by their fading energy levels. At half-time of their pitifully tentative showing in the added period all of Chilwell, Disasi and Moises Caicedo could be seen prostrate on the pitch receiving attention for cramp.

Not losing superseded winning as Chelsea’s top priority. “The team started to feel that maybe the penalties will be good for us,” said Pochettino, making an admission of weakness that is being held against him and this group of players in the acrimonious aftermath.

Pochettino’s face sums up the Chelsea mood (Getty Images)

Finals define the clubs, players and coaches who contest them. Klopp has lost his fair share over the years but never through passivity, and that ironclad commitment to the idea of who Liverpool are carried the day at Wembley. Chelsea’s identity as expert winners of finals began to slip in the final years of Roman Abramovich’s ownership; this is now seven cup final defeats in their last eight visits to the national stadium, and six in a row.

Doubts about Pochettino’s ability to reverse that trend will only intensify. In five years at Tottenham, he built impressive teams who fell just short of winning and despite his avowed emphasis on the power of positive energy, his callow Chelsea were undone by Klopp’s peerless mastery of psychological momentum.

Liverpool at full strength are vastly better than Chelsea but they won the Carabao Cup final not through superior talent, but superior mentality, coupled with an unmistakeable sense of identity that binds the first team and academy together — in other words, things that Boehly and Clearlake’s money cannot simply buy.

“They need to feel the pain,” Pochettino said of his Chelsea players. The pain of this banter loss will be hard to shift, immortalised by Neville’s brutal words.

(Top image: Pochettino changes were not as effective as Klopp’s. Photo: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)

Related Topics:Chelsea Featured premier league soccer

Click to comment

Culture

What do the numbers say about competitiveness in the postseason for NFL, college football?

Published

5 hours ago

January 18, 2025

Press Room

What do the numbers say about competitiveness in the postseason for NFL, college football?

One evening after the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff concluded with four blowout games staged on campus, ESPN host Scott Van Pelt and football analyst Tim Hasselbeck held a conversation that mirrored many like it taking place on social media and in barrooms.

The host teams won by an average of 19.3 points, and the closest outcome was Notre Dame’s 10-point victory against Indiana. Two games — Penn State over SMU (28 points) and Ohio State over Tennessee (25) — were non-competitive. Texas’ 14-point win against ACC champion Clemson was decisive as well.

“Are these the games you want?” Van Pelt asked the former NFL quarterback. “No one can be sitting there and going, ‘You want these blowout games.’”

Hasselbeck responded, “We’re going to have blowouts in these NFL games, too.”

The loud and contentious debate about whether Indiana and SMU deserved CFP at-large bids overshadowed the reality of postseason football in both college and the NFL. There are at least as many blowouts as there are memorable finishes. That was true in the four-team Playoff era, which began in 2014, and as Hasselbeck pointed out, it’s true in the NFL during the same time frame.

Since the Playoff system debuted following the 2014 season, there have been 40 CFP games. The average margin of victory in those games is 17.5 points. During the same time frame, there were 124 NFL playoff games, including 10 Super Bowls. The average margin of victory was 11.1 points per contest.

One fact has emerged from the CFP and NFL playoff data. No matter the round, location, level or seeding, it’s a coin flip whether postseason football produces a competitive game or a blowout. The numbers bear that out.

CFP average margin of victory

	Games	Margin
First round	4 Advertisement	19.3
Quarterfinals	4	14.5
Semifinals Advertisement	22	16.5
Championship	10	20.1 Advertisement
Total	40	17.5

CFP data

The non-competitive nature of the CFP’s first round produced knee-jerk reactions and wild takes largely because of the participants. But the scoring margin was comparable to what transpired in the previous decade. Three of the four first-round CFP games were decided by at least 11 points, and two had victory margins exceeding 20 points.

Pundits largely scoffed at Indiana, which scored two late touchdowns at Notre Dame before falling 27-17 in the first-round curtain raiser. But of the 10 CFP games this season, it has had the third-closest result.

“This team earned it, the right to be here,” Indiana coach Curt Cignetti said afterward. “I’m not sure we proved that tonight to a lot of people.”

Regarding CFP history, Indiana’s loss ranked in the upper third as far as competitive final scores. Since the CFP’s debut in 2014, there were more games decided by 20-plus points (17) than by one score (12). More than two-thirds of the games (27) featured a margin of at least 11 points.

In 10 seasons, the CFP’s least competitive round was the championship. Only three of the 10 were decided by one score ,and all three took place from 2015-17 between Alabama and either Clemson (twice) or Georgia (once). The Bulldogs’ 65-7 romp over TCU concluding the 2022 season pushed the average margin to 20.1 points for the title round. While that score was an outlier, five of the 10 championship margins exceeded 20 points.

“These types of margins that we experienced in the first round of the College Football Playoff happen all the time,” Fox college football analyst Joel Klatt said on his podcast following the first round this year. “It’s been happening in the College Football Playoff four-team model forever. We’ve had some absolute duds for semifinals and in the championship game.

“And hey, by the way, there’s large margins in the NFL as well.”

NFL playoff margin of victory since 2014

	Games	Margin
Wild card	54	11.9
Divisional Advertisement	40	9.9
Championship	20	12.6 Advertisement
Super Bowl	10	8.4
Total	124 Advertisement	11.1

NFL Playoff data

The NFL playoff model largely mirrored college football’s postseason results. Five of the six wild-card games last weekend were decided by at least 12 points — two eclipsed 20 points — and the average margin of victory was 15.2 points per game.

There was little variance between the AFC and NFC. In the 54 wild-card games, the average margin was 11.9 points per game (12.7 in the AFC, 11.2 in the NFC). Of the games at non-neutral sites, the divisional round featured the closest margin of victory on average with 40 contests decided by 9.9 points per game (10.9 in the AFC, 8.8 in the NFC). The championship round victory margin was 12.6 points per game (10.7 in the AFC, 14.4 in the NFC).

The Super Bowl’s recent run of competitive contests has become an anomaly to the overall data. Once derided for perpetual disappointment on the big stage — from 1982 through 1996 every NFL title game except for two featured at least a 10-point margin — the NFL championship game generated the closest outcomes of any playoff round (8.4 points per game). Six of the most recent 10 Super Bowls have been decided by one score, and only one featured a margin beyond 14 points.

But for the 114 NFL playoff games at home sites, the percentage of competitive NFL contests alongside blowouts was comparable to the college game.

Home field, one-score games

Perhaps the most coincidental statistic concerns home-field advantage. In both the AFC and NFC, home teams were 38-19 (76-38 combined) in 10-plus seasons, winning exactly two-thirds of the playoff games from the 2014 postseason onward. Home teams won by an average of 13.1 points per game, while road teams won by 7.9 points per contest.

In 10 seasons, top-seeded teams in both the AFC and NFC were 14-4 in the postseason, combining for a 28-8 overall record. Top seeds won by an average of 14.1 points per game, and their losses came by an average of 5.8 points per game.

With home-field advantage, seeding impacts the NFL much more than in college football, which applied it for the first time this year. All four teams hosting CFP games won, but the top four seeds earned a bye and have yet to host a game on campus. Combining the four on-campus contests with the 36 neutral-site CFP games, the higher seed posted a 21-19 overall record but was just 3-9 in games decided by one score. In one-sided contests featuring victories by more than one score, the higher-seeded team won 64.3 percent of the time. Top-ranked teams were 12-7 in CFP action, winning by 21.1 points per game and losing by 13.9 points per game.

Since 2014, the NFL postseason featured almost an even split between one-score games and blowouts. Of the 114 playoff games played at host sites, 59 (51.8 percent) were determined by one score while 53 (46.5 percent) were decided by 11 points or more.

College football has a lower percentage of one-score CFP contests with 12 of the 40 (30 percent) fitting in that category whereas 27 (67.5 percent) had margins that exceeded 11 points. Perhaps in the clearest difference between the NFL and college football, 42.5 percent of CFP games featured a margin of at least 20 points while only 16.7 percent of NFL games landed in that category.

(Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; Photos: David Madison, Perry Knotts, Joseph Weiser / Getty Images)

Culture

Book Review: ‘Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers,’ by Anne Somerset, and ‘Q: A Voyage Around the Queen,’ by Craig Brown

Published

12 hours ago

January 18, 2025

Press Room

Book Review: ‘Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers,’ by Anne Somerset, and ‘Q: A Voyage Around the Queen,’ by Craig Brown

“There is a natural inclination in mankind to Kingly Government,” said Benjamin Franklin, and if they might seem unlikely words from such a pen, much of history confirms them. Most lands in most continents have usually been ruled by kings and queens, perhaps nowhere more so than in Europe.

When war began in 1914, no fewer than eight countries were ruled by descendants of Queen Victoria. Three of her grandsons waged a war whose consequence saw two of them (Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and Czar Nicholas of Russia) lose their thrones.

One monarchy survived — and as remarkable as that survival is the fact that for 133 of the last 200 years England has been ruled by two queens regnant, women who inherited the throne in their own right. Queen Victoria’s reign of more than 63 years was overtaken by Queen Elizabeth II, who had reigned for 70 years when she died in 2022. They have now inspired two books, completely different in kind, both truly fascinating.

Anne Somerset has had the excellent idea of looking at Victoria’s relations with her prime ministers in VICTORIA AND HER PRIME MINISTERS: Her Life, the Imperial Ideal, and the Politics and Turmoil That Shaped Her Extraordinary Reign (Knopf, 630 pp., $45), while in Q: A Voyage Around the Queen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 672 pp., $35), Craig Brown has produced another collage of the kind he’s more or less invented, following “Ma’am Darling,” on the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, and another on the Beatles.

When Victoria succeeded her uncle William IV in 1837, she was nervous and pliable. She was smitten with Lord Melbourne, her first prime minister, and was at first deeply dependent on him, although not as dependent as she would be on another man.

In 1840 she married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. They were both only 20, and it was an arranged marriage, but remarkably successful. Albert had liberal sympathies — only months after their wedding he presided over a meeting of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade — and was unusually intelligent for a princeling.

Albert’s influence was obvious. Although at first “strongly prejudiced” against Melbourne’s successor, Sir Robert Peel, Victoria grew to admire him. Then came the great crisis of Peel’s conversion to free trade and the opportunity to destroy him taken by “that detestable Mr. Disraeli,” as Victoria called him. She and Albert also hated Lord Palmerston — “Pilgerstein,” as they called him — while Albert deplored what later might have been called his policy of liberal interventionism, and was dismayed when he became prime minister during the Crimean War.

But no war affected Victoria as much as the death of Albert in 1861. It left her almost paralyzed with grief: For years she could barely face official duties or appearing in public. Shedding much of his liberalism, she now abhorred “reform for the sake of alteration and pulling down what exists,” but had no power to prevent it. After the Third Reform Act of 1884, six of 10 adult Englishmen were enfranchised.

The 1850s to the 1870s saw the great personal duel between W.E. Gladstone and Disraeli. Only one of them knew how to deal with the queen. “Mr. Gladstone addresses me as if I were a public meeting,” Victoria said, which aggravated her dislike of his increasingly radical politics. But Disraeli won her heart with what the biographer Jane Ridley has unimprovably called his “camp sycophancy.” When Prince Albert died, “Dizzy” wrote to her that “there was in him an union of the manly grace & sublime simplicity, of chivalry, with the intellectual splendor of the Attic Academe.” The queen declared it “the most striking and beautiful letter” she had received.

At times Victoria found the strain of her duties so great that she declared herself “dreadfully disgusted” with politics and “tempted to go off to Australia — there to ignore all.” But she stayed, though helpless to prevent the re-election of her liberal nemesis Gladstone, openly — sometimes shockingly — siding with his adversaries.

What a contrast between the reigns of Victoria and Elizabeth! The one saw England ascend to an unparalleled position, with the greatest empire the world had ever seen, the Royal Navy ruling the seas and the City of London the hub of the first great age of financial and commercial globalization. But Elizabeth’s reign was a long story of coming to terms with decline, the end of empire, and a much reduced place in the world — or sometimes not coming to terms with it.

There is also a marked contrast between the two women, and in the character of these two books. “Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers” is all politics and personalities, while “Q: A Voyage Around the Queen,” has neither.

And Elizabeth herself remains a cipher. Brown describes his grandmother’s meeting with the queen, and his own, and her many thousandfold identical exchanges with people who met her: “Have you come far?” and “How interesting” figure prominently.

As a result, the book might be called an exercise in reception history. So much of it is about how the rest of the world responded to the queen, using the same words again and again, as in “The queen looked quietly radiant” (Sylvia Plath after a royal visit to Cambridge in 1955). The queen has appeared in many people’s dreams, including rather too many of Brown’s (full disclosure, I have never in my life dreamed about Queen Elizabeth).

People who met her saw what they wanted to see, and felt what they wanted to feel, not least presidents and first ladies. After Ronald and Nancy Reagan dined on the Royal Yacht Britannia in 1983, Nancy described the encounter as “two mothers and wives talking about their lives, mostly our children.” Hillary Clinton recalls the queen wearing “a sparkling diamond tiara that caught the light as she nodded and laughed at Bill’s stories.”

Elizabeth was always courteous, with tyrants like Idi Amin or Nicolae Ceausescu as well as leaders of friendly countries, but she couldn’t conceal her dislike of one: Donald Trump, she complained, was always looking over her shoulder, presumably for someone he considered more important.

“Apart from horses and racing I could not discover anything that interested her,” said Lady Gladwyn, the wife of a British ambassador, and Elizabeth comes alive with her four-legged friends. Brown’s pages on her corgis, those rather unpleasant little Welsh dogs, are a comic masterpiece. They were forever biting people’s ankles, palace footmen or distinguished visitors, but no one could complain. When one corgi died and someone who knew the queen well wrote a letter of condolence, she received a six-page reply detailing and extolling the wretched pooch’s life and character.

Brown highlights one utterly discreditable episode in the queen’s life, in which she sacked her racing trainer, and evicted him from a house she owned — when he was undergoing heart surgery and had not long before broken his neck. This incomprehensible decision was intensely unpopular, and was generally attributed to the malign influence of her crony Lord Carnarvon, to whom she seemed nearly as close as to the Duke of Edinburgh, her cantankerous consort.

The “annus horribilis,” as the queen called it, of 1992 saw marital breakups of the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Duke and Duchess of York, along with attendant scandals. Prince Philip was chancellor of Cambridge University. That year an honorary degree was conferred on Jacques Derrida, and when somebody described him as the exponent of deconstruction theory, Brown relates, Prince Philip was overheard muttering that his own family seemed to be deconstructing pretty well.

Even if Queen Elizabeth remains a mystery, and if some of the mawkish devotion once showered on her was cloying, perhaps this isn’t a bad time to recognize the virtues of constitutional monarchy, with a head of state selected randomly by inheritance who can be respected by the public and stands above the strife and sometimes squalor of politics.

Over the years American friends have asked me in a slightly condescending way, “Would you really rather have Queen Elizabeth as your head of state than” whatever president was in power at the moment? — be it Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush — to which I would reply, “Since you ask, yes, actually.”

Funnily enough, no one has asked me this recently.

Culture

American men can’t win Olympic cross-country skiing medals — or can they?

Published

20 hours ago

January 18, 2025

Press Room

American men can’t win Olympic cross-country skiing medals — or can they?

Ever since Jessie Diggins started collecting Olympic medals and crystal globes and staking her claim as the world’s top cross-country skier, she has made it clear that she wants her legacy to be something more than wins and appearances on podiums.

She wants to spawn a new generation of top American skiers, even among the men, who have yet to achieve the success that American women have.

Diggins could be on the cusp of doing that — with a major assist from Ben Ogden and Gus Schumacher, a couple of 24-year-olds who just might be on the verge of taking American cross-country skiing where it hasn’t been before.

These are the boys who have grown up watching Diggins’ every move, seeing her collect trophies and medals and, because of that, believing they could one day, too. These are the boys who are landing on podiums and fist-bumping Norwegians and Swedes at the end of races.

They hear half-drunk Scandinavians chant their names as they whiz by them on snowy tracks through the forests of Europe, especially Ogden. His mustache and full-gas-from-the-start style have caught the imagination of Nordic skiing fans in the sport’s spiritual centers in northern and central Europe. In American skiing circles, he gets compared to Steve Prefontaine, the mustachioed track star of the 1970s who ran like Ogden skis, with a caution-to-the-wind fearlessness that can hurt your lungs to watch.

It wasn’t long ago, like maybe even the summer before last, that Ogden, a 6-foot-4 Vermonter, would turn sheepish when people would ask him what he did for a living. Sometimes he would tell a half-truth, focusing on his studies as a part-time graduate student in mechanical engineering at the University of Vermont, as if racing on the World Cup circuit was a side hustle.

Not anymore.

“I’m just like, ‘I’m a skier, I’m a professional skier,’ straight up,” Ogden said during an interview this fall in New York, a couple of weeks before he and Schumacher headed to Europe for nearly five months. “I’m a lot more proud.”

After winning the coveted green bib as the fastest skier 23 and under during the 2022-23 season, Ogden got his first career podium in the first stage of last season’s Tour de Ski, a multi-race event that began with a sprint in Toblach, Italy, but COVID-19 and mononucleosis cut his season short. This season, he had the top qualification time in the sprint in Lillehammer, Norway, in early December, finished 15th overall in the Tour de Ski earlier this month and on Friday earned his second career World Cup podium with a third-place finish in the 10-kilometer skate race in Les Rousses, France.

As for Schumacher, last February the rugged Alaskan thrilled some 40,000 fans who lined the course of the 10-kilometer World Cup race in Minnesota, where he became the youngest American ever to win a World Cup and the first American male to win a distance event since 1983. He has three top-10 finishes already this season and is 12th in the distance standings.

“We used to celebrate top 30 (finishes), and the top 20 was crazy because you finish in the top 20, you get paid,” Schumacher said, sitting next to Ogden in a club chair at a midtown Manhattan hotel. “Now it’s top 10, because you finish top 10, you could have been on the podium, for sure. Depending how things go, you can win.”

Ben Ogden, left, and Gus Schumacher give the Americans a shot to end what will be a 50-year drought since the only U.S. Olympic medal in men’s cross-country skiing. (Michael Loccisano / Getty Images)

In all, six American Nordic skiers landed on the podium during the 2023-24 season, including Ogden, Schumacher and Diggins, who won the crystal globe for the overall title for a second time in the past four seasons.

As recently as 2018, the U.S. was looking for its first Olympic medal in cross-country skiing since Bill Koch won the silver in the 30-kilometer race in 1976. That was the lone American cross-country medal until Diggins started collecting them, first with Kikkan Randall in a team sprint in 2018 and then in two individual races four years later.

At 33, Diggins has won so many of the big prizes in her sport. She could retire tomorrow and call it an epic career. During a conference call with reporters before the season, she said being a part of the U.S. team, which largely spends the winter traveling and living together because it can’t go home between races, plays a major role in her decision to keep coming back.

“I love what I do, and I love who I do it with,” Diggins said. “It is hard to be on the road for four months. The idea of doing this together with this team and going after relay podiums and (the) Nations Cup, things like that when we group together, that to me is so exciting.”

In years past, and even in other sports, some men could resist seeing a female champion as a role model. On the U.S. Nordic team, Diggins functions as a team captain, big sister, den mother and chief glitter application officer. During Schumacher’s first few years on the World Cup, Diggins put him up in the house she would rent during the Christmas break.

He and Ogden are feeling a little more grown up after last season, the first when they felt empowered enough to start making some decisions for themselves, figuring out what might work best for them as individuals. They got COVID-19 at the same time in January. After their period of isolation ended but before they were ready to start competing and training again, they decided to head to Spain for a few days of warmth and sun on the beaches near Valencia rather than hunkering down in chilly Switzerland.

They’ve even discussed doing that again this season as a kind of midseason break that their European competitors get every few weeks when they head home.

“Just to, like, get away from the racing scene a little bit,” Schumacher said.

“We used to celebrate top 30 (finishes),” Gus Schumacher says of his progression in the sport. “Now it’s top 10, because you finish top 10, you could have been on the podium.” (Maja Hitij / Getty Images)

As skiers, Ogden and Schumacher come at the sport from opposite ends. Ogden excels in shorter races. He’s never really seen a race where he doesn’t want to burn from the beginning. Schumacher is better at longer distances. He specializes in pacing, in thinking his way through races.

“I think I made good progress by being a patient racer,” he said. “I like to look around during a distance race, take in my surroundings and think — which is not to say you don’t do that,” he said, as he turned to Ogden.

Ogden immediately interrupted.

“No, I don’t,” he said.

As they have improved, their peer groups have shifted some. It is the nature of cross-country skiing, with so much time spent battling with competitors on sometimes woodsy, isolated trails that you end up being most friendly with the people you finish with.

At first, beyond the U.S. team, they were most friendly with the lesser skiing nations. Then they got pretty friendly with the Swedes. Now they are getting to know the vaunted Norwegians, the kings of the sport.

Ogden’s father, who introduced him to cross-country, died during the 2023 offseason. When the season started up again, Norway’s Johannes Klaebo, pretty much the world’s best skier, was among the first to approach him and offer his condolences.

“That was pretty incredible,” Ogden said.

The relationship between the Norwegians and the U.S. cross-country team is a funny one. The Norwegians are constantly telling the Americans how they want them to excel, because they see the U.S. as a huge potential market. They know American success will be good for the sport. They got to witness that firsthand with the throngs of cross-country enthusiasts who greeted them in Minnesota, which produced some of the biggest crowds the sport had seen.

“Then we win and it’s like a national crisis for them and they fire their wax techs,” Schumacher said, only half-joking.

Like everyone this season, their eyes get big when they think about the world championships in February in Trondheim, Norway, the biggest event ahead of the 2026 Olympics in Italy. Can they medal in the relays or the team sprint there? Maybe. More individual podiums would be great, too.

Mostly, though, they want to make their presence felt. They want to be a part of the conversation and feel like every time they race, they can win.

“We want to be someone that people are looking out for,” Ogden said. “We do that for other people. Right now that’s becoming us.”