Johannes Høsflot Klæbo wins fifth Tour de Ski and stakes his claim ahead of Milan

Johannes Høsflot Klæbo won his fifth Tour de Ski on Sunday, a new record. The victory should send the Norwegian into the Milan Olympic Games in peak form, where he is likely to be a favourite across events.

With three stage wins earlier in the week and a 1'23" lead going into the mass-start in Val di Fiemme (Italy), Klæbo approached the last stage with the Tour virtually in hand. A 12th place for him on one stage — 58 seconds behind the stage winner Mattis Stenshagen — and a tense moment in the brutal climb of the Alpe Cermis (an average gradient of 24%, up to 28% in places), where Stenshagen reduced the overall deficit to under a minute, were not enough to unseat Klæbo. He sealed his fifth Tour de Ski title, surpassing Dario Cologna’s record, and added another chapter to his sport’s history.

At 29, Klæbo now completes an already remarkable trophy case: five Olympic titles, five overall World Cup crystal globes (2018, 2019, 2022, 2023 and 2025) and fifteen world championship titles — including an astonishing Grand Slam at last year’s Worlds in Trondheim with six gold medals.

The Dæhlie Olympic record in the crosshairs

As Klæbo accumulates records and wins, superlatives start to feel insufficient. Spectacular, prodigious, explosive — none seem to capture the scale of his dominance. By making high-level achievements look almost routine, he creates a new normal, says Maurice Manificat, 2015 world silver medallist in the 15 km free and an Eurosport consultant: “Like Mikaela Shiffrin, he has an ease in winning and stringing top performances together. He is almost unbeatable. He’s in control all the time, it becomes almost normal.”

One month before the Milan–Cortina Olympic Games (6–22 February), Klæbo’s record makes him an even greater force. Even in a sport filled with legends, only one benchmark still seems to hold: Bjørn Dæhlie’s eight Olympic gold medals. At 58, Dæhlie could be watching his record from the armchair — but few would be surprised if Klæbo, currently the World Cup leader, came close to that mark in February.

Saturday in Val di Fiemme, on the piste that will host the Games, Klæbo already put his stamp on the Olympic track with a decisive final acceleration in the sprint. “It was good,” the Norwegian summed up modestly. “It was really useful to see how things go on the Olympic course.”

Questions remain among his rivals about how to stop him. Alexandre Rousselet, head of the French World Cup group, believes Klæbo does not crack under pressure. Maurice Manificat adds that Klæbo “even when a bit challenged in sprints senses danger and gets out of it — he escapes forward. He simply goes faster than the others. He has an incredible ability to eliminate random factors.”

Klæbo’s fifth Tour de Ski underlines that he arrives at Milan as the man to beat.