CBC's Karin Larsen in Korea: Johannes Hosflot Klaebo is about to make cross country skiing sexy
YouTube vlogger a precocious talent who makes the world swoon
From every Olympics there emerges an athlete or two who transcend the Games — either through epic performance or epic notoriety.
I'll call the latter the "Eddie the Eagle" category. Ben Johnson and Tonya Harding are charter members.
The former is the "Usain Bolt" category. This club includes Nadia Comaneci, Michael Phelps and perhaps, one day, Johannes Hosflot Klaebo.
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Klaebo isn't a household name, but the cross country skier from Norway is poised to take his sport and celebrity to a new level when he makes his Olympic debut in Pyeongchang.
At 21, he is a precocious talent with the looks of a young Matt Damon who is taking the sport by storm.
Add to that his millennial cred: Klaebo's weekly YouTube vlog routinely attracts between 50,000 to 100,000 viewers.
The vlog is a fascinating glimpse into the charming life of the young skier from Trondheim. Younger brother Ola puts it together and grandfather and coach Kare is sometimes recruited to operate the camera.
We see Klaebo training (a lot) and winning awards like Norway's breakthrough athlete of the year.
We see groups of girls giving him the Justin Beiber treatment, screaming his name from behind the fences. (Did I mention cross country skiing is to Norwegians like hockey is to Canadians?)
We learn he has no time for a girlfriend with all that training.
Mostly we see an athlete who is neither brash nor humble, but matter-of-fact about his domination of the sport.
Leading up the Olympics, Klaebo won 10 of his first 20 World Cup races and made the podium in four others.
Last season — his first on tour — he won the crystal globe as World Cup sprint champion while still competing and killing it on the junior circuit.
The Olympics are only the next hill for Klaebo to conquer and there's no reason to believe he'll leave Korea empty handed.
Klaebo's first race is the skiathlon in Korea airing Saturday night where he'll go head to head with Canada's Alex Harvey.
