The World Cup cross-country skiers are in Liberec, Czech Republic, this weekend for two sets of races - distance freestyle races today and classical team sprints on Sunday - which are test runs for the Nordic Ski World Championships, to be held in Liberec in 2009.
Trouble is, there's no snow in Liberec, so the organizers had to obtain snow elsewhere - and chose a protected nature reserve from which it's apparently illegal to remove anything, even frozen water. But they got enough snow to lay down a 1900-meter track (which one coach typified as "mud, rocks, and slush") for the races.
Sorta. Rather than staging a 10km for the women and a 15km race for the men (themselves, changes from the longer pursuit races which had originally been scheduled but which would have required even more snow to lay two sets of tracks), the organizers shortened the events to 7.6km (four laps) for the women and 11.4km (six laps) for the men. Each lap featured a single substantial climb at the midpoint - not a terrible slope, unless you have to ski it four or six times. The races were run, ironically, in light snow flurries, before substantial crowds (and why not? a 1.9km course practically made the race into a track meet - ideal for spectating), and amidst race personnel who dutifully shoveled the scarce snow into low spots created by the racers, picked stones out of the snow, and generally tidied up.
Truncating the women's race worked against pre-race favorite Charlotte Kalla, who excels at the full 10,000 meter skate race. She raced well, however, to finish third, gaining valuable points in her chase of Finn Virpi Kuitunen for the overall World Cup title. Ahead of Kalla, the Norwegian Astrid Jacobsen notched her second win of the season and her seventh podium finish. Down 6.6 seconds to the leader at the 4.9km timecheck, the reigning sprint world champion delivered a powerful last lap to win by 0.4 seconds over Justyna Kowalczyk (Poland). With the win, Jacobsen has clearly eclipsed Marit Bjorgen as the best female Norwegian racer, and now is within a few good races of taking over the leads of both the distance and overall World Cup standings. Kowalczyk's second place puts her, too, in the mix for the World Cup titles. With eight individual races left to go, all three of today's podium finishers will vie with Kuitunen for the overall title.
Czech racer Lukas Bauer - rather, Lukáš Bauer - started the men's race as the heavy favorite, both because he's leading the World Cup overall standings and because Liberec is home snow. Bauer skied his usual excellent race over the 11,400-meter course, and would certainly have won but for a once-in-a-lifetime effort by the unheralded Jean-Marc Gaillard, who finished the race 12 seconds clear of Bauer. Gaillard was nearly six seconds out of the lead at 3000 meters, but capitalized on the strange nature of the course to accelerate for the win. With a whopping 79 men starting at 30-second intervals, the 1.9km track quickly became densely packed with racers. Starting eighth, Gaillard managed to "catch a ride" with the Austrian skate specialist Christian Hoffman, who started 4:30 later but who was just heading out on course as Gaillard passed through the stadium at the end of his first lap. Being fresher and faster, Hoffman served as the rabbit for Gaillard for most of the rest of the Frenchman's race - and eventually wound up in third, 21.8s behind Gaillard. When Gaillard crossed the line, he bested the then-first place time by nearly a minute - a staggering gap.
With the bad conditions, the team sprint races on Sunday should be very interesting, if not outright violent.