For the second men’s race in a row leading off the 2023/2024 World Cup season, I’m going to start with who didn’t win: Iivo Niskanen of Finland, the longtime classic virtuoso, did not win an interval-start classic race on home soil. Instead, it was Martin Løwstrøm Nyenget of Norway who took the victory in the 10-kilometer interval-start classic race in Ruka, Finland, earlier Saturday.
On the one hand, this is objectively newsworthy; eight out of eight of Niskanen’s World Cup victories have come in the 15km classic interval-start format, and six of those eight occurred in races held in Finland. (He also has Olympic and World Championship gold medals in the 15km classic interval-start, plus two more Olympic golds in the 50km classic mass start and the classic team sprint. Hot take here, Iivo Niskanen is good at classic skiing.) So while it is always presumptuous to expect an athlete to deliver a win, Niskanen’s second-place finish on Saturday is probably noteworthy on its own.
On the other hand, Niskanen’s last-second slip from gold down to silver at the hands of a later starter led to this all-time clip, in which the Finn pivots from congratulating his opponent to expressing his frustrations with remarkable alacrity. I don’t have anything snarky to say about this; Niskanen believed in himself and had hoped to win, which is all that any athlete should ever do. He was frustrated when he learned at the last moment that he had not, and, after extending his well-wishes to the winner, demonstrated as much.
All that said, this is hilarious:
“I’m not the best loser. It wasn’t fun to lose,” Niskanen clarified after the race, according to an auto-translation.
(For his part, winner Nyenget was hardly offended: “I like that. I understand that he wants to win at home. Seeing that it means so much to him spurs me on,” the same article quotes the Norwegian as saying.)
As noted, Martin Løwstrøm Nyenget won the race, with Iivo Niskanen second. Erik Valnes, also of Norway, showed his range after winning yesterday’s classic sprint by finishing third today. Nyenget’s time was 23:31.7. Niskanen was 2.9 seconds back, and Valnes 9.7 seconds back.
The win was the second World Cup victory and eighth podium of Nyenget’s career. He previously won Holmenkollen in March 2022, also in classic. Nyenget took a relay medal at 2012 World Juniors in Erzurum, Turkey, then toiled in relative obscurity (if anything can be more obscure than ski racing in Erzurum) until his first World Cup podium eight years later. Development takes a long time. Nyenget is also known, in certain circles, for his all-time anti-CrossFit snark when it comes to proper form on the SkiErg.
Norway put five men in the top eight on Saturday, which is, somehow, a less comprehensive display of dominance than was the case in most men’s distance races last season. Indeed, behind, mostly, Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, but also a deep bench of teammates helmed by Simen Hegstad Krüger and Pål Golberg, a Norwegian man has won every distance race, both on the World Cup and at world champs, since February 2022. The last non-Norwegian man to win a distance race was… Iivo Niskanen… in… a 15km classic held on Finnish soil. Niskanen was close again today, but ultimately came 2.9 seconds short of repeating the feat.
Likely the most notable Norwegian in the field, Klæbo, was 14th overall (+42.8), as he continues to rebound from a recent Covid infection that interfered with his preseason preparation and kept him from contesting last weekend’s tuneup races in Beitostølen, as is his wont.
There were seven Americans in the race today, led by Gus Schumacher in 22nd (+52.2). Other finishers were Ben Ogden in 39th (+1:15.3), Scott Patterson in 53rd (+1:31.5), Luke Jager in 56th (+1:38.1), Zanden McMullen in 58th (+1:39.3), John Steel Hagenbuch in 66th (+1:55.4), and Zak Ketterson in 71st (+2:16.4).
The 22nd marked Schumacher’s best result in a World Cup classic race since he was 15th in Oberstdorf during the 2023 Tour de Ski, also a 10km interval-start. By my math, the 22nd is the second-best interval-start classic result of Schumacher’s career.
“I felt a little weird today,” wrote Schumacher in comments shared with multiple media outlets. “The first race is hard, in the sense that your body isn’t used to staying at the limit, but I was happy with my pacing and finding my limit at the end of the race. The skis were really good and helped the technique stay together, which is really important in this course. Looking at the results, this is my best individual Ruka start, so that’s good to see and super motivating.
“As for looking forward — I feel like my classic and striding technique has improved, and I’m excited to work on that. Once racing starts to feel more natural, I’m excited to dig more into technique with my coach, Kristen Bourne.”
I had also asked Scumacher a question about the difference between racing and pacing the canonical 15-kilometer interval-start race versus the still-new-to-World-Cup-men 10-kilometer distance, and how that has manifested for him. Schumacher is truly among the most gracious athletes you will ever meet, so this response from him is hardly a criticism, but I am struck on reading his answer that this was perhaps not the best question, or at least not the best way to go about thinking about this. That’s why you ask the questions; you might learn something.
Anyway, here’s Schumacher, in writing to Nordic Insights:
“I guess it’s a little more nuanced in that it is a different race, but I think one of the coolest things about skiing is the somewhat unpredictable nature of each race and conditions, etc. Like even over 10km it could be as fast as 20 minutes or as slow as 30, and some 15ks are as fast as 30 [minutes], so you really have to be adaptable. My point is that the best skiers could change their pace over the duration of the race based on how fast they’re completing a given section, so the switch really shouldn’t make that much of a difference.
“As far as feeling goes, you definitely have to start harder in a 10km, and would spend less time ‘settled in’ in the middle.”
I also asked Scott Patterson, an athlete famed for training huge volume and crushing long races, just how long he had to warm up for before starting the relative sprint of a 10km. Here’s Patterson, in writing to Nordic Insights:
“We started testing skis about an hour :35 before my start, and I didn’t really stop skiing between then and my start. I had to adjust a bit because of the fluoro-free testing, so we had to start a bit early which definitely changes things, but everything went well.”
Patterson added, “I’m looking forward to a longer race tomorrow and skating. Also tomorrow is a mass start, the first one I’ve done in Ruka, which I’m excited about. This was the first race of the season and it’s good to build into it a little.”
So about that fluoro testing: The bottom of the official FIS results sheet contains the above notes regarding jury decisions. In addition to the technique issues that are not uncommon in high-level classic races, the first line is more historic: Ukrainian athlete Oleh Mishchenko was not permitted to start under ICR (International Competition Rule) 351. The online version of the results expands on this: “Other 351.4. Ski[s] are found positiv[e] on fluor.”
ICR Rule 351.4 states, in relevant part, that a competitor “whose skis have been found positive at the controls of fluorinated wax before the start” will not be permitted to start “in any FIS international ski competition.” Mishchenko dropped dirty (i.e., failed a drug test), and that was that.
Mishchenko enters the history books as the first athlete to be excluded from a FIS race as the result of pre-competition fluoro testing. Norwegian alpine skier Ragnhild Mowinckel preceded him as the first athlete to fail a post-race fluoro test following her first run in the season-opening race in Sölden.
It’s a lot of work to thoroughly and licitly cleanse skis of all traces of fluorinated wax. Consider this FAQ that I wrote a full three years ago (passing along the official FIS recommendation that one hot scrape one’s skis ten or more times, in addition to doing a complete replacement of all tools and shop surfaces), or Jessie Diggins’s comments on the American tech team from earlier today: “They have been on fire and working so, so hard especially with the fluro-free rules.”
So while ICR 351.4 is written as a strict-liability offense — any amount of fluoros in excess of the limit will get you disqualified, period — no one was lining up after the race to accuse the little-funded Ukrainian tech team of systematic cheating. Instead, Swedish skier Edvin Anger’s quote was typical of the prevailing sentiment on the issue around the ski world.
“Of course you are a little shocked,” Anger told Expressen, according to an auto-translation. “I have a very hard time believing that it makes sense, that they fill with fluoride on purpose. It’s a sign that this is real and it’s taking it seriously. You have to be very, very careful.”
Racing continues in Ruka tomorrow with a 20-kilometer mass start skate, the first skate race of the World Cup season. Scott Patterson (bib 22), Ben Ogden (bib 24), Gus Schumacher (bib 29), John Steel Hagenbuch (bib 35), Zak Ketterson (bib 48), Zanden McMullen (bib 49), and Luke Jager (bib 52) are slated to start for the American men.
— Gavin Kentch
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