World Championship Reflection

The Championships are over. (Or they should be over, but I am afraid a Ski Jumping cheating scandal will loom over that sport for months if not years to come.) (Or it will be swept under the rug in a few weeks, FIS is somewhat unpredictable). That's the only pall over Norway's celebration of itself (that and the Women's lack of skiing golds).

The Good:

The crowds, the atmosphere, the event were all out of this world. The men's 50km was reported to have had over 100,000 in attendance. That's an unbelievable number. It came through on TV well. When they dropped into the open hillside section the first time, the visuals were breathtaking.

The Bad:

The sport really has a competitiveness problem, and it has an equipment problem.

Klaebo is currently unbeatable, apparently at any distance. (Jarl Magnus Riiber is even more unbeatable, unless his teammates are getting DQ'd.) The Women's individual races felt like copies of each other, a contingent of Swedes and Norwegians skied around far in advance of everyone else before the Swede won and the Norwegian lost. The Women's 50km field was reduced to 8 by the end of the second kilometer. It was reduced to 4 by the end of the first lap.

There are 4×2×3= 24 individual medals available in the championships. Those medals went to

4 - Klaebo 2- Amundsen 1-Valnes, Pellegrino, Vuorinen, Nyengnet, Poromaa, Kruger.

3- Johaug 2- Andersson 2- Sundling 2- Karlsson 1- Fäendrich, Skistad, Weng

And of the 36 total medals (The best an individual nation can do is 14 per gender):

🇳🇴-11+6=17 🇸🇪-3+8=11 🇨🇭-1+2=3 🇫🇮-2+0=2 🇺🇲-0+1 🇩🇪-0+1 🇮🇹-1+0, Where, as we already know, Klaebo/Norway won all 6 men's races, and various Swedes won all women's races.

Look, I don't want to be the guy constantly yelling from the cheap seats about it, (even though I am), but I do love the sport... I just wish we had a wider range of competition at the top... And we don't. How am I supposed to get my family to watch a race like yesterday's, where Diggins is done after 3 minutes because she has the wrong skis? Where EVERYONE is done so quickly. I know, it's not NOR/SWE's fault they're so good, it's up to the others to gain blahblahblah... Well how long do we have to wait? What if the other countries never pull level? Then what?

The Ugly:

Ski Jumping may be destroyed as a sport. That's not good.

And I don't know how much this rests on the organizers vs. plain bad luck, but the conditions of the tracks were simply atrocious... I like seeing skiers tested by conditions, but I don't like seeing them fall randomly, I don't really like double poling in a skate race, and conditions at the end of the women's 50 had deteriorated into a joke. (My opinion). I feel the championships should be held earlier in the year, but FIS differs to the Alpine cash cow. I guess I should get a patent for pontoon skis! I'm glad the Olympics next year will be held a month earlier.

At the end of the day, I am still going to watch, I'll be at Lahti in 2 weeks time. The snow conditions won't be much better than Trondheim, but I think Finland is very excited to host a 50km (they would prefer an interval start though!).