Had to read through this thread, as I'm a norwegian and obviously have a big interest in this.
I think most of you have the right picture of Kjaergaard, but to sum it up: he has never been liked by anyone. I'm more on the "meh"-side, as I don't really care, but seeing how he won gold and a silver at the world championships as a DS (Thor Hushovd and Boasson) and a bronze in the olympics with Kristoff, its pretty strange that he never managed to receive praise. He actually has been receiving critique for those races, especially in the olympics where people thought we should have won the gold as Kristoff was clearly the best sprinter in the front group. Obviously, he simply seems to lack any kind of charisma and ability to be liked by people.
As for the current case: The attitude is that he doesn't tell the whole story, and that he is pushed into clearing his conscience by the recent USADA-investigation. Right now the attitude amon norwegians is that cycling is a dirty sport, and that everyone here dopes, while skiers for instance are clean.
That brings us to cross-country and the work done by the norwegian anti-doping agency: First and foremost, I think the anti-doping agency has been doing a good job, and is pretty stubborn whenever they find results. They tolerate nothing. HOWEVER, I can obviously see that the norwegian results in the nineties do point at a strong possibility for a doping program. Personally, I'm not the type to believe in conspiration theories and similar things, so I think its unlikely, but the domination of cross country skiing does that I accept that others do. Two things to consider: Johan Muhleggs extreme rise t the top when he was on the juice in 02 makes it plausible to believe that it was a clean field otherwise (no one was near his level). And two: there simply isn't, or wasn't anyway, a lot of money in this sport. Not anywhere near the level of cycling. The olympic stars obviously was able to make a huge income in sponsorships and similar appointments, but most of the skiers were, and still is, living on support from the norwegian government. So the doping would be only for national pride. Plausible, but I decide to think otherwise.
Finally, as for the other norwegian cyclists, we know that Thor was a huge talent (won the U23-tempo in 98), who never seemed to quite live up to his potential despite some big wins. Eddy is very similar, a huge talent who just seems unable to take the last step, which suggest a clean slate. Kaggestad obviously never doped, he started getting some results at the end of his pro career when the field seemed to be cleaner, and he has always seemed to carry a very believable frustration towards the doping culture. Nordhaug is a bit different, he could be interpreted in either direction: a cleaner field or on the juice.
As for the old guard: Dag Otto Lauritzen was probably clean until he joined TVM, where he suddenly had a really good final to years to a decling career. Say no more. And on a general basis, the norwegians who became pros generally did it through southern european or danish amateur teams. The story about the naive norwegian is really true, and for most of them, I think no one even thought about taking a stance against doping before watching their italian or danish or whatever teammates taking pills before the big races (this was before EPO anyways, I do think doping was known in Norway in the nineties). I think this makes it plausible to think that most of them decided to take stuff, thinking that it wasnt cheating, it was just like drinking an energy drink or stuff like that.
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