Sander Eitrem of Norway and Ted-Jan Bloemen of Canada embrace after the men's speed-skating 5,000-metre event on day two of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics on Feb. 8.Sarah Stier/Getty Images
Jason Dyck leads track cycling and paracycling at the Norwegian Cycling Federation.
The post-mortems have already started. Canada finished the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics with 21 medals, its worst total since Salt Lake City in 2002, and the diagnoses are pouring in: Funding cuts. Athlete poverty. Federations are stretched too thin. And then, inevitably, Norway.
Norway topped the medal table again, and the comparisons began: their philosophy of joy over competition, their deep pockets, their children who don’t keep score until age 13. I’ve read most of the coverage.
As a Canadian who has spent seven years working inside the Norwegian elite sports system, I want to offer a correction or two, and one insight almost nobody is talking about.
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The most persistent misconception is that Norway’s success is essentially purchased. It’s an easy assumption to make. Norway is a wealthy nation, flush with oil revenues, and its state-run lottery funnels a large share of profits back into sport. But that money flows primarily to grassroots clubs and local infrastructure. It is not a slush fund for elite athletes.
I know this because I live it. As the national paracycling coach and strategic lead for track cycling at the Norwegian Cycling Federation, my athletes have won multiple international medals yet receive funding that is not enough on its own to lift them above the poverty line. Canada’s senior-carded athletes receive roughly $26,000 annually. Norway’s figures are slightly lower. Norway does not have a richer elite sport system than Canada. It has a better-designed one. Those are very different things.
You’ll also hear that Norway has a “no scorekeeping until 13” rule. The story is compelling but subtly misleading. Norway absolutely believes in competition. Children race and learn how to compete. The culture around being fast is very much alive.
What doesn’t exist is a ranking system. In most sports systems, including Canada’s, early results determine who gets the travel team spot, the better coach, the high-performance pathway at age 10. Rankings create divergent trajectories that are very hard to reverse. Norway removes that sorting mechanism.
It doesn’t remove the competition itself, but the consequences that follow from it. Both the fastest and slowest 12-year-olds remain on the same development path. The result, across a generation, is an athlete pool not pre-filtered by the accidents of early puberty. A Norwegian late bloomer is allowed to stay in sport long enough to reach their full potential.
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Here is what almost nobody is addressing. Norwegian children play freely until 13, and somehow a decade later they’re on Olympic podiums. Something has to happen in between. The answer is idrettsgymnas, Norway’s sports high schools. These are fully accredited high schools spread across the country where sport and education are structurally integrated. The first half of every school day is reserved for training; classes begin after lunch. Full-time coaches work alongside teachers. Students spend three years training in peak developmental windows, without sacrificing their education. Rather than asking young athletes to squeeze serious training around homework and a bus schedule, the system resolves that conflict entirely. Crucially, students train alongside equally serious peers, generating their own culture of ambition and accountability. They learn what professional preparation looks like by living it every day. This is the incubator that produces Norwegian Olympic champions.
The sports school model is not easily exportable overnight. But the direction is clear. Canada could push provincial governments to pilot integrated sport-school programs for the 16 to 19 age range. Not elite academies but accessible environments where serious young athletes can train without sacrificing their education. It could also ask an uncomfortable question of its youth ranking systems: Are they finding the best athletes, or just the earliest developers? Precocity is not the same as potential.
And it could stop treating Norway’s success as a riddle to solve with more money. Funding matters, but Norway’s real lesson is that system design is what separates a culture of winning from a culture of hoping.
The Canadian Olympic Committee’s Team Canada 2035 plan names both Play and Podium as strategic pillars. The ambition is right. The athletes who could win medals at the 2034 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics are 13 or 14 years old right now. They are in schools, playing sports, full of potential. Build the right environment for them, and the results will show up on the podium a decade from now. That is not a guess. It is exactly what Norway did.
I’ve seen it work. Canada has the talent. The model exists. The question is whether anyone is willing to take it seriously.