Viktor Thorn, Hanna Falk and Jens Burman have all had surgery for herniated discs in recent years.
The big star Charlotte Kalla, and several other skiers, have also had back problems.
- We are determined that something must be done and it must be done as soon as possible, says national team doctor Per Andersson.
No one knows why the negative trend continues but there are many theories.
At national team level, discussions about what needs to change have started.
Per Andersson is one of those who think about what has gone wrong, why the problems have not been discovered in time and what Swedish skiing must do.
SVT Sport has also spoken with Marcus Bystedt, physiotherapist in the biathlon national team and previously in the cross-country national team.
Together with Andersson, they give the following picture:
Increased back problems apply to overload.
Treacherous damage that creeps in and takes time to detect.
The training culture needs to change.
Find a balance between endurance and strength, and to work injury prevention.
Better technology is gentler on the back.
Measures must be taken at an early age.
Train right from the start.
New requirements in cross-country skiing
Andersson admits that there have been knowledge gaps among skiers, coaches and doctors to discover the problems.
- We have not really been able to handle these new requirements that exist in cross-country skiing, he says.
With the "new requirements", the national team doctor means that cross-country skiing today requires more explosiveness, not only in sprints but also in mass starts.
- In addition to the extreme endurance of distance riders, you also need to be able to be muscularly strong and be explosive, develop a lot of power in a short time to keep up with a sprint and a change of pace.
KLIPP: Thorn calls for an investigation into the back problems
Javascript is disabled
Javascript must be turned on to play video
Read more about browser support
The browser is not supported
SVT does not support playback in your browser.
We therefore recommend that you switch to another browser.
Read more about browser support
Viktor Thorn hopes an investigation can provide answers to why he and many other Swedish cross-country skiers have suffered from serious back problems.
Photo: Bildbyrån / SVT
Cross-country skiers must continue to train for many hours to gain better endurance.
The question that must be broken is how the riders can fit in with other training as well.
- Because they have to recover too.
It is not only possible to put in training, you also have to change.
For example, if you have back pain, you remove a pole workout and train preventively instead, says Marcus Bystedt.
Marcus Bystedt has fixed many longitudinal ridges and tries to describe how high-speed stacking eats away at the ridges.
- Most people have made the plank, haven't they?
If you take the plank and do it with a jump and land, then you get this failure, it is the one that comes with every single pole pull when you hang on the poles.
You should hang in position with upper body weight.
It requires a lot of torso and shoulder strength.
"Extra important with technical training"
Bystedt believes a lot is gained if the riders improve their technique.
Everyone he meets with problems has one thing in common:
- Almost all squats.
That is why technical training is extra important.
You should not sway so much in skiing.
This is the kind of thing you should start working on early.
Both Andersson and Bystedt believe that training should be repeated at an early age.
- If I had to decide, they would start training bonfires at the age of 9-10, Bystedt says.
Andersson again:
- We need to ensure that we get a good education from coaches in terms of young people, juniors, ski high schools and all the way up to the national team.
This is something that I think is founded early on, so that you get a healthy training environment at a young age and get it all the way up to a national team.