The men's and women's races at Holmenkollen were both barnburners. Very high temperatures - nearly 40 degrees F - made the conditions very wet and sloppy, and increased the difficulty of a racecourse that is already, by dint of distance and terrain, one of the hardest. The interval start system sent the racers out at 30-second intervals, which pitted the skiers more against the clock - in the form of split times, shrieked by coaches - than against one another.
The story of the women's event was the dominant performance of Finn Aino Kaisa Saarinen, an excellent racer who has ben overshadowed by Virpi Kuitunen all year long. Starting near the back of the field, Saarinen led at nearly every time check, and ended up taking first by 30.6 seconds over Kuitunen. German Claudia Künzel-Nystad ran much of the race in second place, but faded badly at about the two-thirds mark. Goaded on by coaches reading the German's dissipating splits to them, both Kuitunen and Petra Majdic (Slovenia) were able to push hard in the last ten kilometers and overtake Künzel-Nystad, pushing her down to a hard-luck fourth. Majdic's third-place position was about fifty seconds off Saarinen's winning time of 1:23:55.7. Kuitunen's second place all but assured her of the World Cup distance title, as she is 100 points up on second-place Katerina Neumannova in the standings. If, at the last distance race of the season next Saturday in Falun, Sweden, Kuitunen finishes worse than 30th place and Neumannova wins, they would finish the season tied. That occurrence is highly unlikely.
The men's race also featured some exceptionally tight competition. Starting nearly last, Norwegian Odd-Bjørn Hjelmeset, the favorite, turned in some of the fastest splits at every time check in the 50,000 meter race. Hjelmeset traded the lead with two Germans: Rene Sommerfeldt, who slowly slid out of the lead and off the podium over the second half of the race, and Tobias Angerer, who started last and fell as far as many as 41 seconds behind Hjelmeset at the end of the first 16.7km lap. Over the second lap, Angerer steadily trimmed Hjelmeset's lead until he surged into the lead as he came through the stadium before the last lap. Angerer held that lead almost to the finish, but Hjelmeset knew of Angerer's attack from the Norwegian coaches and had a secret weapon: his countryman Frode Estil, an experienced long-distance racer who willingly served as a rabbit for Hjelmeset over the last 10km. With Estil pacing and plowing through the melt, the Norwegian duo cut into Angerer's lead. Over the last 4,000 meters, their attack converted Hjelmeset's 6.5-second deficit to Angerer into a 9.8-second advantage, giving Hjelmeset a famous triumph and his second 50km win in two weeks, after the gold in this event at the World Championships. Hjelmeset celebrated his win by leaping up and over the finish line. Angerer finished second, Estil third in the last long-distance race of his career.
The other big race in Norway on Saturday - the Birkebeiner, run up north from Rena to Lillehammer - was cancelled part way through when high winds made safe racing difficult. American racer Brayton Osgood has a good account of his aborted race on his blog.