Words by Andy McGrath. Photography by Orbital Studio.

Ping. 

Kristian Blummenfelt makes the noise of an elastic band snapping. 

The Norwegian triathlete will never forget accelerating, looking back and seeing the gap open up on closest Olympic rival Alex Yee. 

Eight meters, ten meters, fifteen meters. 

It was happening. Ten years of hard work boiled down to a four-minute finishing touch, full gas. Blummenfelt connected with a base survival instinct to go all out.

“I was almost running scared of that 100-meter sprint finish, as I don’t have a great one,” he says. “The closer we get there without me holding the gap, the more likely I will lose – or die.”

He ran like the gold medal and his life, about to change forever, was depending on it.

Olympic success is usually the highest sporting summit. Blummenfelt simply used his 2021 triumph in Tokyo to jet off into the stratosphere. With nothing to lose, it was time to attempt a fanciful goal: winning the Olympics, the World Triathlon Championship Series (WTCS), the Ironman World championship and the 70.3 equivalent in the space of a year. For anyone other than this relentless competitor, it would have been sheer madness.

An active kid who played football and rode his bike in the Bergen mountains, 30-year-old Blummenfelt always wanted to be a professional athlete. “I was very sport addicted,” he says. “I probably had too much energy inside my body as a kid. When you have that amount, you’re like a battery that just keeps going. When it’s easier to enjoy sport for longer, you get confident doing it. I’ve always enjoyed the competitiveness in sport–it’s like a playground for me.”

Blummenfelt started out swimming but after not standing out in the pool, he tried triathlon on a whim and won his first race in 2008 as a 14-year-old. 

The next step was joining the youth national team set up by Stein Gundersen, aimed at developing teenagers to eventually challenge at the 2020 Olympics and the World Triathlon Championship Series. “Not because I was extremely good but because I was one of the four he was able to find over the internet who was willing to join,” Blummenfelt says.

His own gradual evolution has gone hand-in-hand with that of Norway as a triathlon nation. Starting from scratch, without a history or blueprint, has made it easier to think outside the box. “It maybe gave us more room to be more creative in terms of the volume we were doing. We really had almost nothing to lose,” Blummenfelt says.

The ‘Norwegian method’ has been revolutionary in recent years, redefining how best to prepare for endurance sport with substantial lactate threshold work and high volume at low intensity. “Four or five years ago, people were almost laughing at us, that we were going into the lab so many times and doing testing, and maybe not winning as many races. That’s changed a little bit now,” Blummenfelt says. “I think that’s been a key part of the success.”

His coach Olav Aleksander Bu has been integral, helping him to work on his weaknesses and to switch between distances quickly. Blummenfelt is an ideal physical specimen for triathlon too. He has a larger lung capacity and heart than average, and his highest recorded VO2 max (the measure of aerobic capacity) has been noted at around 90. 

Then there’s his own restless pursuit of his own limits and phenomenal workrate, driven to beat past versions of himself. “That’s the main [motivating] thing, being able to see how far you can dig deep and improve on sessions,” he says. “I’m very aware of how my numbers are feeling this time around compared to last time. I can remember the splits I did from specific sessions five years ago in Sierra Nevada. I’m also chasing them.”

He averages 30 hours a week, training between two and three times a day. His ironclad discipline has barely changed since adolescence. “That’s what my swimming coaches when I was 14-years-old were really fascinated by … I feel the pure, hard work that I'm putting down is the same now as it was 20 years ago.”

It’s hard to imagine Blummenfelt idling on a beach reading a book. He’s more likely to be testing his time-trial position or training with a mask on, looking for any advantage. After all, as he has said in 2023: “the harder you push, the sweeter winning is.” 

His progress was incremental. As a youngster, Blummenfelt looked up to the WTCS and short-course dominators, Javier Gómez and the Brownlee brothers. Soon, he was vying with them. “I felt I was making progress, that I was getting closer to the best and I felt I had it inside me,” he says.

However, it took several years to win the most prestigious races. After a string of near WTCS misses, victory at the Lausanne grand final in 2019 was his entry into triathlon’s elite, and confirmation he was on course to achieve his Olympic dream.

On the eve of the big race in Tokyo, a memory from 2012 popped up on Blummenfelt’s social feed: a newspaper article from his local newspaper, Bergens Tidene. The headline read: ‘I want to win Olympic gold’. He was right where he needed to be, literally and figuratively. I’m only here for that reason, he reminded himself. If I don’t do it, it’ll be three dark months afterwards.

Blummenfelt doesn’t enjoy pushing himself into mental and physical purgatory while fighting for the win. “No, it’s more about being in the moment at a critical part of the race. Six minutes left and you have to disconnect those feelings and ask: how empty is my tank? Can I keep pushing here? Is this a pace my competitors are going to run to the finish line or is it a surge? Because if it’s a surge, you can always go above what you’re doing, knowing the pace will ease off later.”

“And that’s also where I normally put in my surge, like going with 1,500 meters left in Tokyo, because that’s also one of the toughest points of the race mentally.”

Sometimes, the pain of possible defeat spurs him on. It hurts more to lose is his mantra, even written on his bike toptube. “Of course the wins themselves give me good joy then and there,” Blummenfelt says. “But very quickly after, I want to do it again.”

“And very often, people enjoying a lot of success have a period with a lack of motivation. But for me, it’s almost the opposite. It’s more like ticking a box and going for the next one if it goes well. If it goes badly, it’s like an injection of vitamins. I just want to crack it,” he says, emphasizing the final words in a frustrated tone. “All those [bad] moments from the race annoy me, they stay in the back of my mind for a couple of weeks. It gives me more motivation to perform.”

Blummenfelt’s post-Olympic goal of winning the WTCS, Ironman Worlds and 70.3 Worlds had been on his hit list for years before Tokyo. “I failed to win the 70.3 within a year, it took me 18 months,” he says, almost apologetically. The following year, Blummenfelt added a sub-7-hour Ironman in a special, paced race.

Ironman [a 2.4-mile (3.8km) swim, 112-mile (180km) bike and 26.2-mile (42km) run], 70.3 and short-course [a 0.93-mile (1.5km) swim, 24.8-mile (40km) bike and 6.2-mile (10km) run] are so drastically different in their demands that it’s like comparing writing War and Peace to a novella and a poem. To succeed was bold, brilliant and boundary-breaking, creating sporting history. 

Of the various triathlon distances, Blummenfelt feels long-course suits him best. “I think it’s easier to win another Ironman world title than it is to win the Olympics,” he says. “It’s maybe down to my natural gifts. Most of the guys racing the World Series wouldn’t be able to win the Ironman straight away and the same the other way round. One thing isn’t necessarily easier than the other, but my engine comes naturally more than the speed required for the short course.”

He regards 2023 as an average year, with winter sickness impacting his first races as well as at the WTCS grand final. “But I felt I had enough good moments in training that gave me belief I can get where I need to be in 2024,” he says. 

Blummenfelt enjoys hearing “reigning Olympic champion” over the public address system as he walks onto the pontoon pre-race and has no intention of relinquishing his title. “I want to show that I can combine this with an Ironman world title once again. That’s the big next challenge,” he says.

“I would say my hunger is the same. I feel I know how to get the fitness again, but the pressure is even less in one way. Even though I’ve won a lot of races, some people have written me off because of the last season I’ve had.”

Blummenfelt feels there is more heat on rivals Alex Yee and Hayden Wilde and the French contenders, racing on home soil.

“I’m almost coming in there as an underdog, with a unique chance to be double Olympic champion,” Blummenfelt says. “It’s my bonus chance, basically.”

Given his character, unparalleled ambition and repertoire, Blummenfelt will go down in history as a triathlon legend. “I think no triathletes will ever be able to win the races that I’ve done in the time period I have,” he says. Underdog or firm favorite, Kristian Blummenfelt’s “bonus chance” this year, is the race to watch.