Olympiatoppen and the thirteen-year threshold
The second response to Calgary was structural. Norway built Olympiatoppen, its national elite performance organization, to concentrate coaching, sports science and funding on athletes who had already shown promise, but only once they reach the age where the children's guidelines stop applying. Promising athletes enter the high-performance pipeline through their National Sport Federations and Olympiatoppen only after turning 13, meaning the system spends the first decade of a child's sporting life protecting participation and the years after that identifying and developing talent, rather than trying to do both at once from early childhood.
