Davos World Cup

In this last World Cup hit out before the Olympics we were hoping for a step towards making the Sprint finals. Esther Bottomley finished 47th in the women's sprint, with FIS points of 82; Paul Murray was 58th in the men's sprint with FIS points of 77. Both were about 3.5 seconds outside the top 30, which is not bad, but just a little short of where we wanted to be. The course was hard and fast, and actually one of the better designed sprint courses that we have seen this season. Nice and wide, a good long start straight, a couple of short hills, and a good fair finish. Norwegian skiers won the qualifying, but Swedish skiers (Bjorn Lind and Anna Dahlberg) won the finals. The breakthrough performance came from Chandra Crawford of Canada, who made her first A-Final and took the bronze medal.

The Olympic Sprint fields will be slightly easier, as the top nations like Norway and Sweden will only have 4 skiers each; however our athletes will still need to find those extra seconds over the next couple of weeks (the Sprint is on February 22nd) if they are to have a chance of making the finals.

Tomorrow Paul Murray will make his distance World Cup debut in the 15km Classic event. His distance FIS points are the second worst in the field, but hopefully he can knock off a couple of athletes and also get another good quality session in before we head to Torino.

Konig Ludwig Lauf, Oberammergau, Germany
In the German Worldloppet event in Oberammergau KT Calder finished 2nd in the 23km freestyle and Ben Derrick was 7th in the 55km freestyle. A pretty good result for KT, but BD had been aiming a little higher - the last two years he has been 2nd and 4th in this event. His description of the race: "I got spanked at the start, then skied really hard to get 7th in a sprint for 5th place (note this was a 6-way sprint). My body felt good but skis maybe had a bit too much structure." The winner of the 55km was Tom Reichholt (yep the winner of the Surselva last weekend). KT's second place was behind Germany's Kathrin Zeller.

Tomorrow BD and KT compete again, in the 23km classic event - the FIS Marathon Cup distance is 55km.


Courtesy XC Files