Blowing & Drifting

Forecast: Significant blowing and drifting, with the possibility of heavy accumulation in rural areas.

Sapporo World Championships - Day 7

Yesterday, the women's individual-start skate race at the Nordic World Ski Championships in Sapporo adhered to its script, with the world's best skater, Katerina Neumannova, winning handily. Today, the men's race threw the script on a bonfire. A short but intense snowstorm struck just as the "red group" of high-seeded skiers was about to start, wreaking havoc among the favorites and putting the gold and silver medals around the necks of two utterly unexpected skiers. The win went to Lars Berger (Norway), a moonlighting biathlete, who had started in the first half of the  field - usually a no-man's-land of young, slow, inexperienced, and/or "exotic" skiers with no chance of placing. But Berger is a great skater - one of the fastest on the biathlon circuit - and he turned in the fastest splits at every time check. Finishing second, 35.8 seconds behind Berger, was Leanid Karneyenka (Belarus), an unknown's unknown who was the third man out of the starting gate and who had never before started a World Cup race. Only the bronze went to someone predictable: Tobias Angerer (Germany), who by dint of starting last fought through the end of the storm and into the clear for his crucial final lap. His last 1800 meters were substantially faster than either Berger or Karneyenka, putting him on the podium.

And while Angerer's performance is perhaps the race of the championships (on a par with Norwegian Frode Estil's winning silver medal in the men's pursuit at Torino after breaking a ski and a pole in a crash at the start), the best-race honorable mention should go to Canadian Brian McKeever, who is legally blind yet raced to 24th, the best North American result. The poor American showing led head coach Pete Vordenberg to mystifyingly decide to skip the men's relay in the hopes that the men can focus on the 50km mass-start race on the last day of the championships.

The U.S. is fielding a women's team (including great blogging skiers like Kikkan Randall on the scramble leg and Laura Valaas on the second leg) on Thursday in the 4x5km relay. The event is usually highly competitive and even cutthroat, since national pride, not individual results, are on the line. My picks, after seeing that Kuitunen is going to go for Finland and that Bjørgen's results are so bad that Norwegian coaches are publicly blaming each other for them:

women's 4x5km relay

1) Finland, 2) Sweden, 3) Norway