Nothing Is Impossible

Norway’s Kristian Blummenfelt has rewritten what is possible in triathlon over the past 12 months. From a gold medal to multiple world titles and the fastest Ironman finish in history, he’s done it all—except beat the sport’s greatest champion on the most storied course.

Words BRAD CULP Photography EMIL SOLLIE

Blummenfelt notched a staggering historic double—Olympic gold and an Ironman world title—in one year. But he’s far from satisfied.

Blummenfelt was photographed in his hometown of Bergen, Norway, on June 14 and 15.

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It’s impossible to go anywhere but up from the city center in Bergen, Norway. The old wharf is surrounded by seven small mountains, and the one nearest the city—Mount Fløyen—has a tram car that creeps its way to the top, carrying hundreds of cruise ship passengers to the top every hour. Ironman and Olympic triathlon champion Kristian Blummenfelt knows the top of this mountain well, even though he would never set foot on the tram. During the four or five weeks per year he spends in his hometown, it’s where he spends much of his time cycling and running, almost always in the rain.

At the summit, just a few hundred feet from an outlook where tourists draped in plastic ponchos snap pictures of the city from 1,300 feet above, there’s a tiny brown barn where a handful of goats live. Nearly every time he runs by, Blummenfelt, 28, jokes that it’s Jan Frodeno’s house, referring to the 41-year-old German who has dominated the sport for more than a decade and is universally considered the greatest triathlete of all time: the GOAT. Some of Blummenfelt’s teammates have given all the goats names to honor other legends of triathlon, but as far as he’s concerned, it’s the house of Frodeno.

Up until May, Frodeno was the only triathlete in the long history of the sport to win both an Olympic gold medal and an Ironman World Championship— something once considered impossible because of how different the distances and styles of racing are. The Olympics are contested over a 0.9-mile swim, 24.8-mile bike and 6.2-mile run. An Ironman consists of a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike and 26.2-mile run. Frodeno won the 2008 Beijing Olympic triathlon in a thrilling sprint finish, and then the Ironman world title seven years later in his second attempt.

While it may seem like an eternity in most sports, taking seven years to figure out an event that’s nearly four times as long was considered remarkably swift by triathlon standards, and many wondered if such a feat could ever be repeated. That was until May, when Blummenfelt won the Ironman world title in his first attempt, just nine months after standing atop the podium in Tokyo. A rough equivalent would be winning Olympic gold in the 10,000 meters on the track and the Boston Marathon in the same year— which has never come close to happening.

But there are two asterisks next to Blummenfelt’s title, and neither is small. He won his Ironman World Championship in St. George, Utah—a temporary home of the event that has lived in Kona, Hawaii, since 1978. Due to COVID concerns and a very limited number of hospital beds in Kona, the event was moved to St. George after two years without a race on the Big Island.

Ironman and Kona are intrinsically linked, much like the Masters in golf. If the Masters were moved from Augusta for a year, it would lose virtually all of the allure, for athletes and fans alike. Even calling it “The Masters” would seem like a slight to tradition.

To honor the legacy of Kona—the race that essentially built the sport—Ironman chose one of the hardest courses on its 65-race circuit to serve as a onetime stand-in, moving the event scheduled for October 2021 in Kona to May 2022 in Utah. The 2022 Ironman World Championship is slated to return to the Big Island this October, and that’s where the other asterisk comes in.

Absent in St. George were the only two men with a legitimate shot of defeating Blummenfelt. One was Frodeno, who suffered a tear in his Achilles tendon while trying to prepare for a world championship much earlier in the calendar year than is normal. It was supposed to be the first race between the two, who have never met—nor spoken. The other missing man was Gustav Iden, who knows Blummenfelt better than anyone else on the planet.

Two years younger and also from Bergen, Iden is the two-time winner of the Ironman 70.3 World Championship (half of an Ironman distance), and the pair spend upwards of 300 days a year training and traveling together. Iden came down with a respiratory infection the week before the race—as did Blummenfelt—but the younger of the two Norwegian superstars wasn’t cleared by team doctors to compete before race day. In Norwegian triathlon, everything is about the team, and the team are almost all from Bergen.

Located on the southwest coast and home to nearly 300,000, Bergen is Norway’s secondlargest city and is about as far removed from the rest of Scandinavia as possible. Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen are the geographic hubs of the region and share many cultural similarities, while Bergen is a bit of an oddity. There’s a Scandinavian sentiment known as hygge, which refers to their desire to live a life of contentment, without being loud, ostentatious or egotistical. Scandinavians don’t go around proclaiming their cities to be the best on Earth, even though, by many metrics, they’re consistently labeled just that.

Hygge isn’t quite so prevalent in Bergen. The rainiest city in Europe isn’t exactly lacking in confidence or personality—locals like to say that they’re from Bergen first and Norway second. Before football matches for Brann Bergen, the anthem of the city plays before the Norwegian national anthem, and the city and national flags fly at the same apex.

“We talk like we’re the greatest people and city on Earth,” Iden says of his hometown. “Our football team is really bad—so bad we’re in the second division in Norway, which is really sad for the second-biggest city. But we all say they’re the greatest team in the world. Bergen is special that way. The confidence level is really high here and we’re very proud of that.”

Blummenfelt clearly isn’t lacking in confidence either, but his isn’t directed outward in the way many Bergensers—like Iden—are famous for. He’s more of an introvert, and his teammates joke that he’s socially awkward—something Blummenfelt doesn’t refute. He doesn’t do small talk and claims his only fear is going on dates with women. “I’d be way more nervous going on a date than at the start of a world championship,” he says. “It would be nice to meet someone, but I wouldn’t sacrifice my sport for it—for now.”

Right now he’s most comfortable being fully immersed in his sport, which means three training sessions most days and spending his few free hours consuming every ounce of triathlon content possible. He loves social media and reads almost everything

Blummenfelt has been running and riding Ironman-like training volume since he was 17.

that’s posted about him, keeping tabs on who believes in him and who doesn’t. It’s motivation, and it helps create an extreme tunnel vision on triathlon.

When he gets some time at home at the end of the day—whether that’s in his small apartment in Bergen or even smaller apartments in his favorite highaltitude training destinations of Font-Romeu, France, and Sierra Nevada, Spain—he sets a timer for two hours, so that he has a reminder to shut everything down. If he has a momentary break from triathlon, it’s a few minutes of Netflix before bed.

“My favorite TV series is Dexter because of his personality,” Blummenfelt says. “He’s obsessed with one thing. Just instead of murder, my obsession is triathlon. It’s kind of the same: He wakes up and has the same routine, and he’s working on this one specific thing all day. And he’s working on fitting into society while doing this one thing he really likes.”

Blummenfelt was born the youngest of three children in what he and his teammates joke is the rough side of Bergen. His father was a construction worker and mother a nurse, and he and his two older sisters enjoyed a relatively normal middle-class upbringing, which is pretty comfortable in Norway. Neither of Blummenfelt’s parents were athletic, and his father was a heavy smoker throughout much of his childhood. But like most Norwegian families, they spent nearly all their free time outdoors, hiking, skiing and camping as often as possible.

Swimming was the sport that made him fall in love with racing, and he was good but not great in a country not known for its prowess in the pool. At only 5-foot-7, his biggest limiter in the water was his height, but he was remarkably efficient on land, routinely dusting his teammates when they would go out for runs as a means of cross-training. At 12 years old he ran 10 kilometers in 36 minutes, which is a world-class time for a preteen.

Realizing his biggest talents were outside of the pool, a coach suggested he compete in one of the first triathlons in western Norway. Only 14, he finished first as the youngest of 32 competitors. It’s not like he was up against world-class competition, but the ever-boastful Bergen was on a mission to produce Olympic and world champions, and the result caught the eye of the local sports academy.

Roger Gjelsvik is a mountain of a man with a booming voice and an eye for athletic talent. He wears many hats in Bergen, one of which is recruiting athletes with Olympic potential to Tertnes Toppidrett Sports Academy. While many other Northern European countries enlist their most promising sporting youth in military academies where training is top priority, Norway has a number of sports high schools, where the best of the best can essentially start training like an elite athlete before they can even drive.

“There wasn’t really anything physical we noticed about Kristian. We could tell straight away he was different up here,” Gjelsvik says, pointing to his temple. “Sure, the big lungs and big capacity may help, but he was born with that toughness you can’t learn. He’s a Viking.”

Prior to Blummenfelt’s arrival in 2010, Gjelsvik had never recruited a triathlete to the school, and Norway had never sent a triathlete to the Olympics since the sport’s introduction in the 2000 Summer Games. There were already swimmers, cyclists and runners, so he was a perfect fit. Two years later, Iden was enrolled as well. The goal was simple but ambitious: produce an Olympic medal by 2020.

Arild Tveiten, a sports scientist and triathlete, was brought in to run the program, and things started happening quickly by triathlon standards, but still not quickly enough for Blummenfelt. Tveiten and Norway’s growing team of coaches designed a program that adheres to strict testing and data science; anything that can’t be measured is thrown out. Blummenfelt was tasked to do a huge amount of easy bike and run volume. It’s part of why he’s been able to do the seemingly impossible and perform well at all distances at once: He’s been doing Ironman-like mileage since he was 17.

After three years at Tertnes Toppidrett, he was one of the top-ranked juniors in Europe and was ready to pursue triathlon full-time. And he had the support of a new federation with a laser focus on getting one or two athletes to the top of the sport. He was living a nomadic lifestyle and certainly wasn’t getting rich, but he had the kind of backing that made athletes from more established federations envious.

There were months spent at altitude camps in the Pyrenees and Alps, endless testing of both body and equipment and a new level of professionalism for pro triathletes. Other athletes paid out of pocket to join international training groups with big-name coaches. Norway kept its small group together and gave them the funding they needed to achieve the mission.

At the 2016 Rio Games, a 22-year-old Blummenfelt became the first triathlete to represent Norway in the Olympics, finishing 13th as the second-youngest of the 55 men competing. From the outside, it was a monumental achievement for the upstart federation. For Blummenfelt, it was devastation. He’d finished on the podium at a handful of races in the buildup to Rio, so being so far removed from the medals felt like a complete failure. The post-Olympic depression that grips so many athletes was very real for Blummenfelt, but it also helped create the monster that has taken over the sport today.

“The big lungs may help, but he was born with that toughness you can’t learn. He’s a Viking.”

Capped by a brilliant 2:30 marathon, Blummenfelt notched the first sub-7 Ironman in June.

GOING SUB-7

It was a stunt, but it was an incredible one.

Just three weeks after winning the Ironman World Championship in St. George, Blummenfelt took on a oneof-a-kind exhibition triathlon to see if it was possible for a man to break seven hours in an Ironman-distance triathlon if most of the rules were removed. Paced by pro cyclists on the bike and world-class marathoners on the run, he finished the 140.6-mile course at the Dekra Lausitzring racetrack in Germany in 6:44:25, more than 36 minutes faster than his current Ironman world record of 7:21:12.

Only two men and two women competed in this unique event. (The women set out to break eight hours, which both did.) Blummenfelt was pitted against British Ironman superstar Joe Skipper, who was a lastminute substitute after twotime Olympic gold medalist Alistair Brownlee withdrew due to injury. Skipper posted an incredible 3:16 bike split, meaning he rode 34 miles per hour for 112 miles. This left Blummenfelt with a three-minute deficit to start the marathon, but he closed with a 2:30:50 marathon to win by just more than three minutes.

It’s still unclear whether Sub7/Sub8—funded by Polish billionaire Sebastian Kulczyk to market his nonprofit Pho3nix Foundation—will be a onetime affair or if it will return in the future with even loftier goals. Given the ease with which Blummenfelt broke seven hours, sub-6:30 could be the next barrier he sets out to break. —BC

After a recordbreaking year, Blummenfelt has one more huge goal: a win in Kona.

Emblazoned in gold letters on Blummenfelt’s prototype triathlon bike are the words it hurts more to lose. He’s not entirely sure where it started, but at some point after Rio, it became a mantra that has pushed him to the most dominant and improbable year in the relatively short history of triathlon.

“People love asking me how I’m able to dig so deep in races,” he says. “My answer is always that the pain of not winning a race—or thinking that you could’ve gone deeper into the basement—that pain is what drives me in the race. I might have to suffer a lot for the next 10 or 15 minutes, but it’s never as bad as the depression I’ll feel for the next days, weeks or months if I don’t go there.”

The five-year stretch between Rio and Tokyo involved a lot more losing than winning, as is often the case with Olympic-distance races that are decided by seconds. The few victories came as he dabbled in the Ironman 70.3 distance, including setting and resetting the world record on a very fast course in Bahrain. It’s a sport where world records don’t exactly mean much, but speed is speed, especially on the run. Blummenfelt was demonstrating he could run faster than anyone before him at multiple distances.

His only major win in the buildup to Tokyo came in the final race of 2019—the World Triathlon Grand Final in Switzerland—where he won on the top circuit for the very first time. He was now one of the handful of Olympic favorites, and the year off from COVID didn’t change any of that.

Asked if the extra year of preparation was key to his win last year in Tokyo, he shrugs. “Our preparation was going right heading into 2020 and 2021,” he says. “I don’t think it made much of a difference.” The three Norwegians in the 50-man field finished first, eighth and 11th. The other two—including Iden, who finished eighth—were extremely disappointed with their result.

When Blummenfelt announced he’d like to win the Ironman world title after winning the Olympics, he was mostly mocked on social media. Only once in the 44-year history of the race has an athlete won on debut, and never before had an athlete excelled at Olympic and Ironman racing at once. There was a linear progression that every athlete before him had followed, but he and his team had the data to know they could perform the same three disciplines for a much longer duration. It was just a matter of more testing and fine-tuning the pacing.

Part of what baffles people about Blummenfelt is his build. At 5-foot-7 and 163 pounds, he’s often labeled as big for an elite triathlete. There are even fat jokes directed at him on Twitter. Frodeno, by comparison, is nearly 8 inches taller and only a pound or two heavier. Blummenfelt is putting an end to the long-held belief that long and lean is the only ideal body type for ultra-endurance sport. Both he and his coaches are quick to point out that the engine matters more than the exterior.

“I’m motivated by it,” he says. “I like getting messages on social media from people saying I helped them believe they could run faster as a big person. It’s funny. I’m coming from swimming, where I was always the small guy. And when I go to Kona, I’ll be looking way up at Frodeno.”

In the year since Tokyo, Blummenfelt has taken over the sport in a way that even Frodeno never could. He followed up the gold medal by winning his first World Triathlon Series title, making him the only athlete to win gold and a world championship in the same year. After the Ironman World Championship was moved to this spring, he decided to make his Ironman debut in Cozumel in November, covering 140.6 miles faster than anyone in history. But the swim in Cozumel was down-current, and the course is notoriously famous for missing a few hundred meters here and there.

It’s part of why world records don’t mean much in triathlon. Course records do, and when it comes to Ironman, you’ve either done it in Kona or you haven’t. Never mind the fact that Blummenfelt’s 7:49 winning time in St. George was two minutes faster than Frodeno’s Kona course record—and that there’s double the elevation gain on both the bike and run in St. George. From a purely analytical standpoint, Blummenfelt’s performance in Utah is better than anything Frodeno has done in Hawaii. But it’s akin to shattering the course record in Pebble Beach without ever beating Tiger Woods at Augusta. To be the GOAT, you have to beat the GOAT—or at least put his name one column down in the record book.

“I don’t believe too much about the mystique of Kona, or showing respect to the lava fields,” Blummenfelt says of Hawaii—a place he’s never been to and won’t visit until three weeks before race day. “Of course it’s warm and humid, and we know how to prepare for that. We know how to prepare for the distance. I do have respect for the challenge of winning that race. But I don’t think too much about things like people saying ‘you can’t win as a rookie’ or that kind of thing.”

If it comes off as cocky, the kid from Bergen doesn’t mind. Winning Kona, and beating Frodeno—or Iden—is just something else to check off the list before it’s on to the next impossible task. He’s already talking about returning to shortdistance racing to defend his gold medal in 2024, something he admits will be harder than anything he’s already accomplished.

Asked what it will take for him to surpass Frodeno and become the undisputed greatest triathlete of all time, he shrugs. He doesn’t think much about goats, unless he’s running by them.

“If I win Kona, no one will be able to copy the year or two I’ve had,” he says. “I think people will be able to copy what he has done. I’m thinking more about what I can do in the future that no one else will be able to do.”