It was a bit warmer today — I think the temp may have made it up to -10 * C. But instead of bitter cold, we had some wind and snow. The past few days have been the first appreciable snowfall here in 6-8 weeks.
Relays went of this morning, 3×3 and 3×5, with a classic first leg followed by 2 skate. It was still pretty dark out when the girls hit the course, but that didn’t scare anybody. The girls race was pretty tight, with places 3-7 coming in within about 20 seconds of one another. Off the front were NOR/FIN, then SWE in 3rd, and USA 1 came in 6th or 7th, about 18 seconds from 3rd (Liotta, Loan, Gill).
Boys racing was again on a really tough 5km loop. The TD was cool with the fact that one of our relays only had 2 athletes, and allowed them to start and get splits for the first 2 legs (one of our boys is sick, but doing okay). The boys field stayed fairly tight for a few km before the NOR/SWE guys pushed the pace. It was a really hard final km, and a tough final stretch into slow, windblown snow and a headwind. USA boys ended the day in 8th (Cobb, Sinclair, Hanneman).
I think the performances out of these athletes the past 2 days (individual classic, and relay) was more in line with their abilities and they should be fairly happy with those results. After all the travel and racing they’ve done over the past 3-4 weeks, they still had some good performances. It ain’t easy seeing names in the teens/20’s/30’s, when they are used to seeing podiums and top-10s.
Now we’re packing and driving about 5 hours to Helsinki. We all fly tomorrow AM, some of us very early.
Thanks for checking in. Look at the links to the right for the official race site — they should have final results, and they will likely have split times calculated for each leg. Hopefully we’ll get some more posts up here over the coming days with pictures and maybe some more reflections.
Until then, over and out from FIN. //Tim
