Swedish sports should panic
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Frida Karlsson gives away her best years.
And Swedish sports should of course react with – if not outrage then at least mild panic.
The plan to quit at the age of 27 at the same time gossip about the general sickness of talent in sports.
Frida Karlsson will stop skiing after the 2026/27 season, a plan she revealed The Express. Today, still only 25 years old, the skiing phenomenon has even received an SM on home soil to create his dream ending.
But for the skiing association, skiing and all of Sweden as a sporting nation, it must still be described as sad. Because the decision means that no one will ever know how good Karlsson really would have been.
Instead, it is like taking the aspirational motto of the Olympics – on which the point of the entire elite sport rests in many ways: “faster, higher, stronger”.
And add a word.
I want to be extremely clear that this is Frida Karlsson’s own decision. It’s her career, her life and her future. She’ll do (excuse the language) whatever the hell she wants.
But I am irritated by the lack of questioning and I wonder if she herself even knows that she is quitting before she will have had time to reach the peak of her capacity. In fact, I wonder if the whole sport is forgetting that.
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full screen Frida Karlsson. Photo: Carl Sandin / Bildbyrån
Take part in this, Frida
Youth sports in the Western world have been professionalised, which in turn has created a talent sickness where a promising teenager is valued higher than a scarred 28-year-old.
Where we get lost in misunderstandings about what talent even is in a way that seriously damages Swedish talent development – and broad sports.
I won’t go into all that again here, but it’s worth presenting a few selected facts about sports development. If nothing else so that Frida herself gets to share them.
In my experience, the view of sporting development has shifted. It can be guessed when we talk about soccer striker Viktor Gyökeres as something of a “late bloomer” and Allsvenskan Gai’s key player Gustav Lundgren as a “unique football history”.
This is because Gyökeres has now “only as a 26-year-old” seriously entered the world stage. And because Lundgren was a multi-talent in a number of sports and as late as 2021 played in division 2, to now “first as a 29-year-old” become an all-Swedish dominant.
They are described and perceived as exceptions.
Of course it also goes in Offside’s excellent portrait of Malmö FF’s new gold nugget Hugo Bolin to sense a fascination that the midfielder was always the least in his youth teams, last at his age to be promoted from U16 to U17 and also last to take the step from there to U19.
That he was even loaned out to the division 1 team Olympic for a season, only now, after a year younger Hugo Larsson had already been sold to German Eintracht Frankfurt, as a 21-year-old really settle into MFF’s first team.
Hugo Larsson rule. Hugo Bolin exception. But that is not true.
Even so, we keep deluding ourselves that all the normally blooming players are exceptional stories.
So, back to Frida Karlsson. Because the risks of this misconception are worth discussing. And they are several.
One is that young athletes like Hugo Bolin think it’s too late. That they see the dream disappear in U17 and get tired. Because if we build a world where the notion is that it’s a miracle that you break through late, we’re going to lose talent.
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full screenHugo Bolin. Photo: Petter Arvidson / Bildbyrån
Should frighten the sports movement
There are plenty of research studies on successful elite athletes that point in the same direction. That successes at junior level, rather in exceptional cases – than as a rule – can then also be transferred to senior sports.
I in found, for example, that 89.2 percent of those who competed at international level as 17- and 18-year-old juniors did not succeed in reaching the same height as seniors. Meanwhile, 82 percent of those who actually made it as seniors had never competed internationally at the same level as juniors.
The current study included 38,383 athletes competing at the high junior level – and a further 22,962 elite senior athletes – from all Olympic disciplines.
In study in Italian long and high jumpers, in turn, showed that only between 10-25 percent of the athletes who were in the elite as seniors had been the same as 16-year-olds. In addition, the athletes who were most successful reached their personal peak later than others.
A truth that spans sports.
These are conclusions that should soon frighten the entire Swedish sports movement, and lead to both discussions and revolutions at federation after federation. But also outrage, not to say rage, among scores of sporting talents and parents.
But equally worrying is that already established elite athletes risk getting a distorted view of what a sports career should look like.
Everything speaks for it, Frida Karlsson
Take the soccer players as an example again. This year, the players’ union counted Fifpro out that Real Madrid’s Jude Bellingham is on course to become the most capped English footballer ever.
The reason? That the midfielder, before he had even had time to turn 21, had already accumulated 251 professional matches – whereupon the players’ union wanted to sound the alarm that today’s football stars are already destroying their bodies at a very young age.
For example, Steven Gerrard had 93 games before 21, Frank Lampard 98 and David Beckham 54. Three players with long and extremely successful careers and who reached their (in terms of goals) most successful league seasons at the age of 29, 32 and 28 respectively.
Closest behind Bellingham in Fifpro’s example, by the way, were Wayne Rooney with 212 games and Michael Owen with 156 games before the age of 21. Two prodigies we have to describe reached the high points of their careers significantly earlier than the above-mentioned trio – seeing goals already at the age of 21 and 19 respectively (a season Owen then repeated also at the age of 26).
But does it matter then, if the players today play more matches – and that means shorter careers? We still get to see them play perhaps as many games in total anyway?
Yes, I can still think that. Because the risk is not only that elite sports are dedicated to the early developed, but also that we burn out our elite athletes physically and mentally even before they have reached their potential peak. That we thus miss the whole purpose of the sport.
That we never get to see how far it could go. How much man can push the limits. “Faster, higher, stronger”.
That will definitely be the result with Frida Karlsson. At least everything speaks for it.
Age is not a disadvantage
When all Summer Olympics, regardless of sport, between 1996 and 2020 was studied researchers found, for example, that the average age of a participant remained steady over time, at 27 years. At the same time, finalists were on average 16 months older than the average, and medalists one month older.
Based on the data, the researchers determined that the average peak for an Olympic athlete was exactly 27 years, Karlsson’s age when she now plans to retire. But the researchers also saw that the ultimate age of performance differed between different sports.
It was higher in cardio athletes.
Most evidence suggests that age is not a disadvantage – but even an advantage – in cardio sports. Not least in longer endurance competitions, like the ones Frida Karlsson is very good at.
When researchers investigated the results between 1998 and 2010 in the famous ultramarathon race over 100 kilometers in Biel, Switzerland, they discovered that the best average times were achieved in the age group 30-49 years for men and 30-54 years for women.
The performance peak for a fitness athlete was described in the study as occurring between 30-35 years of age, with a flat taper until the age of 50.
Studies on world-class marathon runners show similar tendencies. That the fastest times are set by runners between the ages of 25 and 35 and that the real decline in performance then only occurs after 35.
Another study on a wider sample of marathon and half-marathon runners (over 300,000 in total) showed that the decline in performance among that group only occurred after age 50, and that times there were comparable for everyone in the 20-49 age range.
But then skiing? Maybe it’s different though. Well, very little speaks for it.
I understand if she’s tired
When I myself examine the winners of the men’s Holmenkollen Classic Five Mile (the most prestigious event in the World Cup), the average age of the winners in the last 20 editions is 29.05 years.
A number that is pulled down somewhat by three exceptional talents, Petter Northug (24 and 25 years old at the time of their victories), Aleksandr Bolsjunov (23 and 24 years old) and Per Elofsson (24 years old).
In 13 of the 15 other editions, the winner has been 30 years or older.
In the women’s last ten three- and five-mile races at the same place, the average age among the medalists is 29 years (just Frida Karlsson, who won as a 21-year-old, lowers the average).
In terms of potential capacity, Frida Karlsson should therefore not stop performing at the age of 27. She should just start.
At the same time, it is understandable if she had already tired of the skiing life. On the trips, the rigorous training and the sometimes insanely intense competition program.
On the dream that children today with ever greater determination begin to follow earlier and earlier.
But that understanding should in that case lead to a self-examination of sports, if we are to be able to retain that old Olympic motto at all.
Faster, higher, stronger.
Because otherwise it may be an addition.
Previously faster, higher, stronger.
Parts of the studies and conclusions are taken from Patrik Brenning’s book “That’s how we win again”.
