Tour de Ski — Klæbo wins his fifth; Pellegrino fourth: "Proud, raced until the end"

The 20th Tour de Ski, whose final stages ran on the Olympic track in Lago di Tesero (Val di Fiemme), ended with a record fifth overall victory for Norway's Johannes Klæbo and a fourth-place finish for Italy's Federico Pellegrino. Pellegrino — who had narrowly missed a higher placing after the stage in Dobbiaco — completed the Tour immediately off the podium for the third time. No one equals Klæbo this season: he also passed 100 individual World Cup wins and confirmed his dominance in the season-long stage event that awards a large prize (€80,000 to the winner) and, importantly, 300 World Cup points to the overall winner.

In the final stage with the Cermis climb, Pellegrino reached the summit in seventh. After the race he said: "I am certainly very proud of how it went today. To think I was there fighting until the last 200 metres. It's useless to complain about the places where I might have lost those handful of seconds that then keep me away from the podium — I prefer to look at the glass half full. I won't be able to say I have a Tour de Ski podium in my palmares, but I think three fourth places in four years have a nice value, a solidity that's not insignificant, and the whole team and I can be proud of this. It shows that over a whole career you have to learn to believe a bit more in yourself and it's not easy, especially in a system like the Italian one where coach turnover is almost annual. But I, thanks to my legs, have had the fortune of long relationships with coaches and above all with the last one the awareness of being able to continue to improve until the end of my career, and it seems to be going that way. Now I don't feel too tired, so I'll do just a couple of days of total recovery and then two weeks of high volume. I'll race in Oberhof and Goms not at my best physical condition, but knowing it's necessary to go through those races to put the right fuel in the legs, and then we'll see." He added that the Games are next, where the 35-year-old from the Aosta Valley aims to become the first Italian cross‑country skier with three individual Olympic podiums in three editions (he already has two Olympic silvers in sprints, plus a world title and two World Cup small globes). The last Italian podium at the Tour dated to 2008, when Giorgio Di Centa was third.

Stage winner Mattis Stenshagen (NOR) beat Jules Lapierre (FRA) and Emil Iversen (NOR) on the day. In the final overall standings Klæbo finished in 1:56:12, beating Stenshagen by 30.1 seconds and Amundsen (NOR) by 1:08.4. Elia Barp was ninth at 2:34.8, Simone Daprà 34th at 5:50.1, Davide Graz 38th at 6:14.8, Simone Mocellino 59th at 10:31.6 and Giacomo Gabrielli 67th at 14:36.1.

On the women's side Karoline Simpson Larsen took the Final Climb victory, opening a gap on the final ascent to win in 37:05.3. The Norwegian completed the Tour to claim her second World Cup overall, ahead of American Jessica Diggins and Austria's Teresa Stadlober (2:17 behind) with Heidi Weng another 2:31 back. Caterina Ganz struggled in the final climb and finished 22nd on the day, dropping to 17th overall; Martina Di Centa was 38th on the stage and 37th overall. Iris De Martin Pinter, Nicole Monsorno and Federica Cassol did not start the last stage.

The World Cup now pauses and returns on 17–18 January in Oberhof with a freestyle sprint and a 10 km classic individual race.