Blowing & Drifting

Notwithstanding being run in the freestyle technique ("skating," which has only been widely used in open competition since the early 1980s - which ain't long when one of the biggest international races commemorates an event in 13th-century Norway), the distance races at the Nordic World Ski Championships on Tuesday and Wednesday are the last remnants of the traditional form of cross-country ski racing. Rather than sending the entire field off at once in a chaotic, exciting mass start, the women's 10km and men's 15km will see skiers start one at a time, thirty seconds apart, and then race not directly against one another, but against the clock.

In some ways, these kinds of races - which are still frequently run on the World Cup circuit, if only once at the World Championships and Olympics - are actually more exciting than that mass-start or sprint events. The spectating is more difficult and satisfying, for one thing. It's not enough just to see who is leading the pack, since there is no pack. Instead, following the race entails tracking the split times at each time check and comparing the splits to see who is gaining or losing time - cutting a deficit to faster racers or letting a gap grow. The racers know much of this information, but they learn it as they speed past a shouting coach, and then have to adjust on the fly. For another thing, individual-start racing is a purer test of fitness, insofar as it demands that the athlete balance precisely a pace that can be sustained and a pace that can win the race.

As the racing website Faster Skier puts it, "No more drafting with mad sprints to the finish line. Skiers with the highest MaxVO2, the most efficient technique will prevail." In short, the racing will be intense - but also abstract. And the courses themselves are the wild cards. So far, the distance races and sprints alike have been run in soft, mushy conditions that place a premium on power, rather than technique: a huge amount of energy has to be expended simply plowing through the snow. This will work against the injured (like Finland's Virpi Kuitunen, who has a bad back) and the pure technicians (Christian Hoffman of Austria, a freestyle specialist) but favor those with lots of power (Czech racer Katerina Neumannova) or experience in varied and terrible conditions, like the Norwegian biathlete Ole Einar Bjørndalen. My picks: