Nerdy Accomplishments

The elite World Cup ski season ended on Sunday with the last in a three-race series in Santa Caterina, Italy. Even before the weekend started, Lukas Bauer (Czech Republic) had won the men's overall and distance titles. In Friday's race - a short freestyle "prologue" - Norwegian Ola Vigen Hattestad won the men's sprint title.


The women's overall and distance titles remained on the line through the classical-technique mass start race on Saturday and were only decided in Sunday's pursuit races. The first starter in the women's 10km frestyle race was the defending World Cup champion Virpi Kuitunen (Finland), who led both the distance and overall rankings but who only managed a third-place finish in the spring rankings, which were topped by Slovenian Petra Majdic.


In Sunday's race, Kuitunen ceded her 3-second head start back to the young Polish racer Justyna Kowalcyzk, and even let Kowalczyk develop a gigantic 24-second lead at the 6.9km time check. But then Kuitunen rallied, defying the back pain that has plauged her all season, and mounted a dramatic comeback to pip Kowalczyk at the line by a scant third of a second. With the win, Kuitunen sealed the overall and distance titles - the former by a good margin over Norwegian Astrid Jacobsen, the latter by just a few points over the Ukrainian Valentina Shevchenko.


But that's just the real racing, where the fluoro waxes meet the snow. I am far more eager to report that, on the strength of good showings by Bauer and by Kuitunen's Finnish sidekick, Aino-Kaisa Saarinen, I managed to eke out a narrow win in the championship of the "Fantasy Nordic" league which I was lucky enough to join last fall.

Fantasy Nordic


Run by a skier and bike racer who has - as he likes to say, "a coding problem," fantasy nordic is like fantasy baseball, only with obscure European ski racers, not obscure Latin American infielders. If nothing else, the league finally gave me an outlet for the countless hours I've spent reading the RSS feeds for sites like niche websites like this one and this one. Hooray for the internet - burn your time and realize pea-sized accomplishments!


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