Athlete of the Week: Espen Bjørnstad (NOR)

Norway’s Espen Bjørnstad will probably remember the 2018/19 season for a long time. Ranked outside the Top 30 in the World Cup for the past two consecutive seasons and competing mainly in Continental Cup in the years before, the 25-year-old from Trondheim had his big breakthrough this year and fully entered the world’s elite of Nordic Combined.

What propelled strong jumper Bjørnstad forward is that he learned to hold his own in the cross-country parts of the races. With a 16th place in Ramsau am Dachstein being his worst individual result of the winter and currently ranked ninth in the overall standings, the true evolution of Espen Bjørnstad becomes clear.

Already in Lillehammer, he was close to the podium with the fourth place in the 5 km opening event of the Lillehammer Tour and the first rewards for Bjørnstad’s efforts came in the in the 5 km race of the Nordic Combined TRIPLE in Chaux-Neuve: rank two and his career-first podium.

In Seefeld, the 25-year-old crowned his season with a gold medal in the Team Event but it might have been the competition in Oslo this weekend, that was his true masterpiece: ranking only seventh after the jumping event, Bjørnstad skied with the best. Big names Jarl Riiber, Akito Watabe, Ilkka Herola, Manuel Faißt and triple Seefeld medal winner Franz-Josef Rehrl were his adversaries for the podium positions.

In the end, he only had to let the truly strong skiers Riiber and Herola pass but held his own successfully in a 10 km race against last year’s overall winner Akito Watabe and Manuel Faißt.

“The cross-country part went really really well today”, Bjørnstad gushed after the event. “I can see that I had the ninth best time and this is a personal best for me. I couldn’t be more happy. To get the third place today was just amazing.”

For this achievement and his truly rocket-like development this season, Espen Bjørnstad is our “Athlete of the Week”.