Imagine you are in the best shape of your life, skiing in a World Cup and finding yourself able to hang with the World's best kilometer after kilometer, hill after hill. Then you somehow find the strength and the will to kick it up a notch and start passing Olympic medalists, World Champions, and overall World Cup winners including the guy that won this exact race by a landslide 3 years ago. The overall World Cup leader is barely staying ahead of you. You put on a massive sprint at the end and finish an incredibly close 3.7 seconds behind the winner, good enough for…16th place.
Such was the case for Canadian Devon Kershaw in this morning's 10km+10km pursuit in Falun, Sweden, possibly the most closely-contested World Cup cross country race in history. While massive 10-, 20-, or even 30-skier sprint finishes are becoming more and more common on the World Cup, today's 20km race had the most ridiculously tight finish in recent memory.
![](http://images.fasterskier.com/oldsitearchive/upload/0603082005headshot.jpg width=292 height=440 border=1><BR><font size=1 face=verdana>Kershaw</font></center><BR></p>
<p>The only hint of a breakaway came at about 16.5km, when Jiri Magal of the Czech Republic got a few seconds gap to the chasing pack of 30 or 40 skiers. He was joined at first by Emmanuel Jonnier of France, who was the first to drop back into the pack. Magal held on to his lead awhile longer, but was consumed entirely in the massive final charge towards the finish.</p>
<p>Only about 5 seconds separated the top 20 skiers as they charged down the final stretch in the stadium. Like any World Cup, this lead pack was full of super-heavyweight hitters like former overall World Cup winners Mathias Fredriksson of Sweden and Rene Sommerfeldt and Axel Teichman of Germany, the current overall leader Tobias Angerer, many-time World and Olympic Champion Frode Estil of Norway, Olympic and World Champions Mikhail Botvinov and Vincent Vittoz, and many others.</p>
<p>But it was none other than 20-year-old Norwegian Petter Northug Jr. who blasted ahead of the entire field of veterans at the top of their game to win his first-ever World Cup after being controversially left off of the Norwegian Olympic team. Northug, who has a conveniant January birthday, is still technically a junior and won multiple golds at the Junior World Championships earlier this season, along with a first-place in the Norwegian (senior) National pursuit.</p>
<p><BR><center><img decoding=)
You can also view split times at the following link until the sprints begin early Thursday morning: http://www.sportresult.com/sports/htm/cc/cc.htm
![](https://fasterskier.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2020/09/FasterSkier-logo-sq-320x320.png)