Therese Johaug, who retired after winning three cross-country skiing gold medals at the 2022 Winter Olympics, wants to come back for the 2025 World Championships in her home nation of Norway.
Johaug, 35, said Saturday that she wants to make the Norwegian team for worlds in the 50km, which is being held for women at worlds for the first time in Trondheim.
“I want to and hope to be there, but of course it’s a lot of work,” she said the day before she is set to race a 17km event in Switzerland that is not part of the top-level International Ski Federation circuit.
Johaug said she plans to make a decision on if she will return to elite competition after training the rest of the winter and into the spring.
If she returns, she will not contest a full World Cup season but would ski the necessary races in a bid to make the Norwegian team for the world championships 50km.
A women’s 50km will be held at the Olympics for the first time in 2026. Johaug did not look that far ahead in her comments Saturday.
Johaug said she trained three hours per day in January and wants to run a half marathon in May.
“All the training I have done the whole career, it’s still with me,” she said.
Johaug was arguably the most dominant athlete at the 2022 Olympics across all sports.
She won all three of her individual events, including the first race of the Games (by 30.2 seconds, greater than the margin separating second place from seventh place) and the last race of the Games (by 1 minute, 43.3 seconds, greater than the margin separating second place from ninth).
In her other event, she had the fastest split of the 35 women who completed classic legs on the relay. But Norway finished fifth overall.
Two weeks after the Games, Johaug announced she was retiring at age 33 at the end of that season. She did not want her career to end but felt it was time to do other things than invest full-time in cross-country skiing.
Johaug then had her first child in May 2023.
