Today was the last day of the Tour de Ski, a multi-stage cross-country ski race that’s held in Europe just after the new year. Modelled to some degree on the Tour de France and shorter cycling stage races, the TdS has become a pretty big deal in the world of elite cross-country skiing – which isn’t saying much for most Americans (though a surprising number of people do follow elite skiing), but which means that in Europe, the Tour airs uninterrupted on many national TV channels and attracts thousands of spectators.
Up until today, this year’s Tour had been pretty good, with quite a few interesting and exciting races, a good dose of drama, and almost-daily changes on the men’s and women’s leaderboards. Today, though, the Tour had what might have been its best day ever. The Tour always ends – as it did today – with a “final climb” stage in which racers ski for about four miles through a scenic valley in northern Italy, then ski about two more miles up the slopes of a downhill ski resort. That’s it here, on the right edge of this course profile:

Yeah, the climb is brutal, regularly taking the best skiers in the world about twenty minutes to finish. (These are athletes who can ski 50km – 31 miles – of hilly terrain in about two hours.) And this year, this “final climb” stage saw excellent battles to see who would be the men’s and women’s Tour de Ski champions.
The women’s race was as good as any athletic contest I’ve seen in years, with a late attack by the second-placed skier, the young Polish skier Justyna Kowalcyzk, to pass the leader, the ebullient Slovenian Petra Majdic, and thereby win the TdS championship. But the men’s race was ten times better, pitting the brash young Norwegian Petter Northug – by consensus, the best skier in the world – against the older veteran, Lukas Bauer of the Czech Republic. Northug is a great tactician and a deadly sprinter, so pretty much everyone – including me – thought that he would toy with Bauer and then accelerate away for the win, which would be the most prominent single accomplishment of his short but already great career. To say Bauer was an underdog would be an understatement.
Bauer had other ideas. He first caught up to Northug, who was skiing extremely hard through the initial flat sections, and then remorselessly attacked as they hit the climb. Bauer steadily expanded his narrow lead until, by the top of the mountain, he had crushed Northug by a minute and sixteen seconds – a gigantic gap. His come-from-behind victory and TdS championship was incredible enough to make me say – as I did on Twitter – that “Lukas Bauer is my hero,” but then, rather than celebrating in really any way at all, he stood at the finish line with his skis and poles and greeted other racers – including Northug – as they labored over the line.

The suspense of the race was great, of course, and it’s fun to see how really good skiers ski, but it was really Bauer’s behavior at the finish line that reminded me why I spend quite a bit of time following relatively obscure sports like cycling and really obscure sports like XC skiing. When the action is great, it’s as inspiring as anything else in life.
And on top of all that, I had a nice hard ski workout of my own today.
One thought on “Ski Whee”