'I hope you are ready Jens!’ – Retired Riiber relishes new role
Dec 12, 2025·Nordic Combined
If you’re the most successful Nordic Combined athlete of all time, what do you do the day after you call time on your career?
Have a lie-in? Toast your myriad achievements with a champagne breakfast and revel in the relief of no longer having to get up for training?
Not if you’re Jarl Magnus Riiber.
The five-time overall champion, with a record 78 individual World Cup wins among 111 podiums in 147 starts over the previous decade, was already starting the next phase of his sporting life.
Still only 28, Riiber – who announced at the end of January he would retire at the end of the season after being diagnosed with the debilitating Crohn's disease - had already agreed to stay on with the Norwegian team in a new role as an 'equipment expert' designed to give his team-mates the benefits of his vast expertise and experience.
So it was that after bowing out in Oslo on Sunday 16 March, easing off in the Compact cross-country to take the acclaim of his home fans before being lifted shoulder-high by his team-mates at the finish (above), Riiber was back at the jumping hill on the Monday morning, working with Jens Luraas Oftebro.
“I knew my job would be easier if we started a little bit earlier with the testing, so we had more of a base of information to do the right choices for Jens,” Riiber explained during a FIS Race Talk held in Trondheim before last weekend's World Cup events.
“So it was straight to the hill. I was calling Jens – ‘I hope you are ready tomorrow!’. I was quite tired but I was quite motivated as well, so we got some sessions in.”
To those familiar with Riiber’s legendary dedication to being the best in his sport, that may not come as such a surprise.
But that dedication, which brought such sustained success from 2018 to 2024, also came with huge personal sacrifice.
Spending long periods away from his partner Sunna and young family (below), while trying to stay healthy and strong enough to remain a serial contender, was one reason Riiber cited for his decision to retire.
“Even when results come, I don’t find the joy in it anymore,” he said when he made his announcement. “The sport consumes my entire day, every day, and it feels like I am a prisoner to my own goals.”
For a long time, one of those goals was an individual Winter Olympics gold medal.
Riiber’s first Games, at PyeongChang 2018, yielded a silver in the Team event but two agonising fourth places in both individual Gundersens.
Beijing 2022 brought further trials and tribulations. Suffering from Covid, Riiber was isolated in a hotel for two weeks, missing the first individual Gundersen on the Normal Hill and having no chance to practise on the Olympics course.
A day after being released from quarantine, he delivered the best jump of the Large Hill Gundersen, earning a 44-second lead for the cross-country.
But Riiber took a wrong turn at the end of the first lap – he later said he felt "like a complete idiot" - which allowed his rivals to overhaul him in the tracks. Compatriots Joergen Graabak and Jens Luraas Oftebro took gold and silver as Riiber trailed in eighth.
It would be natural to assume the ‘King of Nordic Combined’ would have been ultra motivated to tick off the one glaring omission from his decorated CV, which includes a record 11 World Championship gold medals, including six individual titles, the last two won at his final major championships on home snow in Trondheim earlier this year.
But with the Milano-Cortina Winter Games only two months away, Riiber insists he has no regrets at leaving the stage before a final opportunity to achieve that ultimate career high.
“If I had that feeling, I would definitely go for one more season and try to take that gold in Cortina,” he said.
Riiber’s energies are now focused on helping some of his former team-mates give themselves the best chance of achieving success in Italy.
Since Riiber claimed the last of his 111 World Cup individual podiums with second place behind Vinzenz Geiger (GER) - the man who succeeded him as overall champion - in a Gundersen in Oslo on 15 March, Norway have been strangely absent from the men’s podium.
The Compact the next day proved to be a valedictory tour for Riiber as he slowed in the cross-country to let almost the entire field past him in his farewell competition.
But it was also the first of seven men's events so far - three at the end of last season, and the first four of this season – with no Norwegian presence among the top three.
Jens Luraas Oftebro, sixth overall for the last two seasons after finishing runner-up to Johannes Lamparter (AUT) in 2022-23, placed fifth in the season-opening Compact in Ruka but a poor jump of only 76.0m in the PCR ultimately left him an impossible 8:18 back in the Gundersen and he opted not to start the cross-country.
Oftebro could only manage 25th and 10th in Trondheim, but elder brother Einar Luraas Oftebro (above) enjoyed his best-ever individual World Cup result of fourth in Ruka and has also achieved two ninth places in an encouraging start to the season.
Andreas Skoglund has also placed eighth in Ruka and 11th in Trondheim but for a country used to dominating podiums in recent years, Norway are going through a transitional phase after the retirements of Riiber and two-time individual Olympic champion Joergen Graabak who, at 34, has also called it a day.
Although Riiber was the ultimate Nordic Combiner, his dominance on the hill earning the Best Jumper trophy in five of the past six seasons and allowing him to control races in the tracks, his fellow Norwegians are mostly stronger at the cross-country aspect, but often needing to make up huge gaps after the jumping phase.
“I'm trying to make a package for the athlete which works together with their technique,” Riiber explained of his new role.
“We have Cortina coming soon and we have quite huge difficulties in technique that we have to fix quite fast. It is my job to go to the athlete to say ‘we have to do this and this'.
“I take them to the hill and do some changes that have not been done before. But to do that in one year is a very short time, so hopefully with more time, we will start to get some momentum.”
If there is one man supremely qualified to super-charge that momentum, it is Riiber.
