Today's two Tour de Ski pursuit-style races at Nove Mesto, Czech Republic, could not have turned out differently.
In the women's 10km race, Virpi Kuitunen quickly wasted her head start over the rest of the field, falling back to a foursome of pursuers by about a third of the way into the race. Though she hung with that group for much of the rest of the race, Sweden's Charlotte Kalla surged away to a substantial lead that she then ceded in the last kilometer as Marit Bjorgen surged past for the stage win and the overall lead in the tour.
In utter opposition to Kuitunen, men's leader Lukas Bauer took advantage of his six-second head start to build a giant lead over a huge pack of chasers. Up 25 seconds at the 2.6km time check, Bauer stretched that to nearly a minute at the last time check. Behind him, nearly 20 racers were clustered within five seconds or so. After a messy crash that knocked a pair of Italians around, Swedes Anders Soedergren and Marcus Hellner broke away, with Hellner taking the sprint for second and Soedergren finishing third.
Going into Sunday's sprint event in the historical district of Prague, everything appears to be pointed toward the huge bonus time awards on offer: the first place finishers will have 60 seconds of time deducted from their cumulative racing time, for instance. Bjorgen must be considered the women's favorite. Her overall advantage is just two-tenths of a second over Kalla and seven seconds over Justyna Kowalczyk of Poland, but a solid 15 seconds on Kuitunen. Kuitunen must try to win the sprint so as to capture the 60 seconds of bonus time and pull back closer to Bjorgen, who in turn must try to finish high and gain offsetting bonus time of her own. Neither can let Kowalczyk or another good sprinter sneak in for any important bonus time.
Though Bauer isn't a particularly good sprinter, his massive 47-second gap back to Hellner means that nobody is likely to gain much time on him in the sprint - though if Hellner can win outright, he would jump into the lead. And some dangerous sprinters lurk further down the general classification, close enough that the bonus time for a high sprint finish would help them climb toward Bauer, or even move just past him.