The roster of twelve American skiers was down to eleven shortly before the Tour de Ski kicked off, with JC Schoonmaker a last-minute DNS from Saturday’s skate sprint due to illness.
“JC is unfortunately sick, but is doing okay!” wrote USSS press officer Leann Bentley to Nordic Insights.
“Ribom’s boyfriend drops out of the tour — hours before the start” read the headline in Expressen (according to an auto-translation), which tells you something about how the Swedish tabloids view the Emma Ribom–JC Schoonmaker sprinting power couple.
The Expressen article quotes Schoonmaker as stating that he woke up today with a slight cold. He told Expressen that he had tested negative for Covid this morning, and would take a flu test soon. His immediate focus was on simple logistics, he told the paper, including figuring out where to live so that he did not infect anyone else on the team.
“It’s crap, really bad timing,” Schoonmaker told Expressen. “I probably could have raced today, but I’m proud of myself for making a smart decision and focusing on the rest of the season.
If you read the list of recently-sick-but-still-raced athletes against Saturday’s results, Schoonmaker’s decision here seems sound. Ebba Andersson raced, but did not make the heats in 38th. Michal Novák was also 38th for the men, with Calle Halfvarsson 41st. Pål Golberg fared the best of the lot, making the heats on the men’s side and finishing 23rd.
Marko Skender of Croatia disqualified following ski testing
Marko Skender joins Schoonmaker at the bottom of the official results sheet in not having a result recorded for Saturday’s sprint. Skender suffers from the more ignominious reason of being disqualified under ICR Rule 222.8, the prohibition on fluorinated ski wax. “Use of fluorinated wax or tuning products containing fluorine is prohibited for all FIS disciplines and levels,” reads the rule. “Fluorinated wax can be a competitive advantage and its use in competition will result in disqualification.”
Norwegian alpine skier Ragnhild Mowinckel became the first athlete to be disqualified from a FIS race under the new fluoro rule, in October of this year. I *think* that this incident with Skender today marks the first such disqualification from a cross-country World Cup race. I should also note that Skender was the only Croatian man entered in today’s race; the positive test could reflect anything from a bad faith attempt to cheat to the absolute good faith inability of a small team to successfully clean skis of all residual traces of fluorinated wax.
Skender is not currently listed in the FIS spreadsheet of sanctions.
— Gavin Kentch
