Jim wrote:
On Jan 3, 3:28 am, Terje Mathisen"terje.mathisen at tmsw.no" wrote:
wrote:
I'm not sure if quiet after some years is agreement. The skiers,
especially those who've been around for awhile, still seem to
appreciate individual start distance races.

Most plain mass start events, particularly skating where drafting helps
even more, tend to become rather boring.

It is just our luck that Petter N should turn up just at the time when
being able to sprint after (or in the middle of) a long race has become
so crucially important, but something like the men's 50k last year in
Holmenkollen had just two interesting questions:

1) Would Petter avoid any accidents/falls?

2) Who would end up in the second/third place?

It must be said that the TdS mass start version, with many bonus
points/seconds to be had in the middle of the race, is much better at
keeping the speed up.

Terje
--
-Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

I must say that Petter's performance in the most recent TdS race was
rather disappointing in that he didn't help the other 3 guys at all
and then flew by at the end. That's his normal MO, but I don't see
how this can be satisfying for him, and furthermore if he would have
helped out a bit he would have helped his own position in the TdS vs
Cologna.

Petter never said anything about this, but the Norwegian head coach said
on NRK that the waxing crew had managed to give him bad skis twice on
this tour, including this race.

As we all know it is _really_ hard to drop Petter, particularly on a
skating race like this, so I believe that by the time Petter actually
gave up, he was pretty much wasted. To me it looked like he had more
than enough to do just to hang on to the end of the group that caught him.

Blowing past them on the final sprint is just being Petter, that doesn't
seem to have anything to do with form or ski glide. :-)

OTOH, Cologna did look a _lot_ fresher than Petter on all the sprint
rounds the day before , including the final. Thomas Alvsgaard on NRK was
quite worried at that time, and less surprised when Dario managed to
drop him on the long uphill.

Anyway, this tour is all wrapped up, the only remaining excitement in
the men's class is who will join Dario on the final podium?

Among the women we probably won't see any resolution before atleast
halfway up the final hill.


Terje
--
- Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"