MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
You've heard of tailgating, you know, showing up to the stadium a few hours early for pregame festivities in the parking lot. Well in Norway, cross-country skiing has what you might call trail-gating. Reporter Nat Herz was at the Nordic World Ski Championships in Norway last weekend and found some truly committed fans.
NAT HERZ: Jon Hamernes and his wife and kids wanted to be sure to get a good spot to watch the championships in the forest near the central Norwegian city of Trondheim. So they got here early.
JON HAMERNES: We set up the tent three weeks ago.
HERZ: Three weeks ago?
HAMERNES: To reserve the place.
HERZ: I find them frying bacon over hot coals, sitting on reindeer and sheepskins next to the 30 bags of firewood that Hamernes hauled in from a parking lot.
HAMERNES: We have also a fireplace inside the tent. It's nice and cozy. You can sit in a T-shirt.
HERZ: Organizers say as many as 20,000 fans are in the woods here to watch their national heroes glide past and try to conquer the rival Swedes. Ragnar Hoas, another fan, explains.
RAGNAR HOAS: You know, all the Norwegians are born with the skis, so the traditional Norwegian heritage is to go skiing. We like to see our athletes. We are very happy when they are winning. But of course, we allow the Swedish neighbors to win sometimes.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD ROARING)
HERZ: Hoas was one of another 30,000 people who watched in the enormous stadium. Think American football, but replace the gridiron with a ski trail that winds out and up into the forest. Norway's men's team has won a slew of gold medals, as have the Swedish women. But American Jessie Diggins made the podium as well. The top-ranked female skier in the world coming into this competition, Diggins struggled with her equipment, but she did win a silver medal.
JESSIE DIGGINS: I had to keep believing in myself and believing in my body and taking care of my body and knowing that it will come. We will nail it. All the skis, the wax, the glide, my body, it will all come together on the right day...
HERZ: Yeah.
DIGGINS: ...And I had to keep that faith. But that does not come easily. It's work. And I think it's OK to acknowledge that.
HERZ: Diggins finished second in the team sprint with Julia Kern. She's one of a few top U.S. prospects who are coming into their own just in time for next year's Olympics. Kern is also involved in a big off-trail story. These races score big TV ratings in Europe, and climate campaigners were threatening to disrupt them over oil company sponsorship. But Kern and another American, Alaskan Gus Schumacher, led international athletes in negotiations that prompted the group to stand down. Here's Schumacher.
GUS SCHUMACHER: It's kind of easy to be, like, in your house where you don't feel a lot of the changes. But, you know, like, we're at Fairbanks latitude in Norway, and it's 50 degrees and it's barely March, you know, and like, Anchorage is out of snow, which sucks. And those are, like, small problems in the full, like, Earth climate issue. But yeah, it's, like, where we see it.
HERZ: The agreement says the athletes will work with the campaigners to phase out fossil fuel sponsorship of major international ski events and to prioritize advertising deals with companies that commit to climate leadership and the long-term future of winter sport. Kern says that rainy, sloppy conditions in Trondheim underscored the importance of the climate work, but the weather barely dampened the enthusiasm of the Norwegian crowd.
For NPR News, I'm Nat Herz in Trondheim.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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