Anders wrote:
kirjoitti:


I don't remember exactly what happened, but a few years ago there was
an incident where either a Norwegian skier broke a pole, or a Swedish
skier broke a pole and a coach from either Sweden or Norway was right
there and DIDN'T give the skier a new pole. This was all over the
newspapers for a few days with discussions of bad sportsmanship, etc.
It may as a result now be policy of a sort after all the bad press.

Certainly one of the most famous cases in this corner of the world
would be the Norwegian coach in Lillehammer 1994 who turned his back on
Mika Myllyl=E4 (who was at that point well on his way to medalling in
the 10km C race and eventually the pursuit, too) and walked away
holding a good half a dozen reserve poles.It caused a bit of an uproar
in Finland and didn=E4t go down all that well with the home audience,
either, who saw it as an infringement against the unwritten law, the
spirit of the Olympics and the duties of the host nation.

The explanation given by the coach was that he just couldn't give away
a pole because a Norwegian might have broken a pole right there, too,
and what would the Norwegian people have said if he'd no longer had a
fitting pole...

IMHO the unwritten law has never applied to relays (I'm not sure about
sprints, either) where teams either have had to rely on their own or to
form mutual assistance pacts with other teams. But if I'm mistaken or
things have changed, I'd welcome it.


Anders

Leave it to the Finnish guys to rember the details of that episode!

Somebody like Excel or Swix should do a sponsor deal for neutral pole
service. Kind of like Mavic does with it's yellow motorcycles in the
Tour de Fance.

Joseph