1. BJORN TO BE A CHAMPION: A come-from-behind finish in the grueling men's 50-kilometer event gave Norway's Bjorn Dahlie his third gold medal of the '98 Nagano Games and the eighth gold of his career. His eight gold medals are the most of any Winter Olympic athlete and one shy of the overall Olympic record shared by U.S. track star Carl Lewis, U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz, Soviet gymnast Larysa Latynina and Finnish distance runner Paavo Nurmi. Dahlie's 12 career medals is the most in Winter Olympics history; Latynina's 18 medals is the most Olympic medals won.
2. A PERFECT TEN: Skiing a leg on the Unified Team's relay team at the 1992 Albertville Games, Russia's Raisa Smetanina became the first winter athlete to earn 10 Olympic medals and the only person to win medals in five different Winter Olympics. Less than two weeks shy of her 40th birthday, Smetanina became the oldest female medalist as well.
3. NIPPING THE NORWEGIANS: In the most exciting finish of the men's 4x10-kilometer relay, Norway, Italy and Finland battled each other through the first three legs of the 1994 Lillehammer Games, with Norway's Bjorn Dahlie and Italy's Silvio Fauner taking control of the anchor segment.
With Dahlie in the lead, Fauner stayed close and refused to take the lead until edging ahead at the final turn. In the final 100 meters, Dahlie tried to sprint past the 43-year-old Italian, who headed off the Norwegian and won by one ski length — a margin of 0.4 seconds.
4. THRICE AS NICE TWICE: Russia's Lyubov Yegorova was three-times happy in a two-year span, winning three golds at the 1992 Albertville Games and three more at the 1994 Lillehammer Games. She tied the Winter Olympic records with her six-gold total.
5. PHOTO FINNISH: In the 15-kilometer men's event at the 1980 Lake Placid Games, Finland's Juha Mieto lost to Sweden's Thomas Wassberg by one-hundredth of a second — 41:57.64 to 41:57.63. After that heartbreaking loss, cross country officials decided to change the rules for timing and round off finish times to the nearest tenth of a second.
6. RECORD-SETTING MARGINS: During the 50-kilometer event at the 1928 St. Moritz Games, there were two large margins — one in the change of temperature and the other in the time between the first- and second-place finishers. With the race starting in temperatures near zero and ending at a 77-degree reading, Sweden's Per Erik Hedlund posted a time of 4 hours, 52 minutes and 3 seconds, which was 13 minutes and 27 seconds faster than second-place Gustaf Jonsson, also of Sweden. The winning margin is an Olympic record that still stands.
7. NINE FOR SIXTEN: At the 1964 Innsbruck Games, Sweden's Sixten Jernberg won the 50 kilometers and skied the second leg of Sweden's gold-medal relay team. With the two gold medals, Jernberg ended his eight-year Olympic career in nordic skiing with nine medals — four gold, three silver and two bronze.
8. DOUBLE DELIGHT REDONE: At the 1984 Sarajevo Games, Sweden's Gunde Svan captured golds in the 15 kilometers and team relay, with the 22-year-old the youngest gold medalist in Olympic cross country history. He repeated the double-dip four years later at the 1988 Calgary Games, winning the 50K and the relay.
9. SWEEP, THEN ESCAPE: Like the Soviet duo of Klavdia Boyarskikh in 1964 and Galina Kulakova in 1972, Finland's Marja-Lissa Hamalainen swept the gold in all three women's individual events. She tried her hand at a makeshift nordic combined, jumping a fence at the finish area and trying to flee from the media before finally relenting for photographs and interviews.
10. RARE AMERICAN GLORY: Bill Koch of Vermont captured the silver medal in the men's 30 kilometers at the 1976 Innsbruck Games, and no member of the American press was there to witness it. That's because Koch's medal-winning effort was rare for the United States — the silver is the only cross country medal ever won by an American.
Koch later became well-known for employing the skating — or "freestyle" — technique in cross country, which resulted in the method being banned from international competition for several years in the mid-1980s.
