By Gavin Kentch
Welcome back to the second half of the Tour de Ski. The athletes are tired. The coaches are tired. The wax techs are tired. I am tired. And yet onwards we go.
Heading into the final three races of the 19th running of the Tour de Ski there are 46 women and 76 men remaining in the field, down from 67 and 100, respectively, in last Saturday’s opening stage. Expect more of the pure sprinters to exit the Tour after Friday’s stage five classic sprint.
Only two of ten Americans who started have left. Alayna Sonnesyn withdrew shortly before the 15km classic pursuit, while Gus Schumacher woke up with a cold following that race. He is planning travel back home to Anchorage as I write this. I would assume that Jack Young and JC Schoonmaker plan to withdraw after the classic sprint.
Here is when the final three races will be. This year’s Tour takes place entirely in one country, Italy, for the first but not the last time; stages one through four were held in Toblach, and stages five through seven in Val di Fiemme. The bus ride between them is scarcely over two hours. Devon Kershaw is not amused.
Tour de Ski in Val di Fiemme (local time at venue: GMT +1. This is 6 hours ahead of the East Coast and 10 hours ahead of Alaska.)
| date | race | time (AK) | time (EST) | results |
| Friday, Jan. 3 | classic sprint qual | 2:15 a.m. | 6:15 a.m. | here |
| classic sprint heats | 4:45 a.m. | 8:45 a.m. | here | |
| Saturday, Jan. 4 | M 20km skiathlon | 1 a.m. | 5 a.m. | here |
| W 10km skiathlon | 5:30 a.m. | 9:30 a.m. | here | |
| Sunday, Jan. 5 | M Alpe Cermis climb | 4:15 a.m. | 8:15 a.m. | here |
| W Alpe Cermis climb | 5:30 a.m. | 9:30 a.m. | here |
How can I watch the races?
I haven’t actually written this one up as a standalone article yet this year, sorry. TLDR, here are your viewing options if you are tuning in from the U.S.:
- Paid and reliable: Pay Ski & Snowboard Live (link) $8 to $9 per month throughout the season if you would like to be assured of being able to watch the races, with good quality, and English audio commentary, and so on. Who will be commenting there? Ryan Sederquist has broken this down for you on his increasingly invaluable site, SederSkier (disclosure: Sederquist will sometimes be the commenter, which means that he is well qualified to speak to these logistics).
- New quantity: FIS TV, which you can find here. Again, the SederSkier article linked above has more thoughts on this.
- Free but take your chances: See what gets uploaded to YouTube after the fact. If you search for the race name and date, you can sometimes find a full broadcast online for a day or two after the race. Try also transliterating the venue name into the Cyrillic alphabet to loop in Russian users. Best to watch this with alacrity if you do find it; they tend to get taken down pretty quickly, because lawyers.
- This worked last year but there’s a catch this year: Last season you could download a VPN (Windscribe should give you enough free bandwidth each month to stream all races), set your location to Canada, and stream races for free on the FIS cross-country page (link). This does work again this year, but only live; replays are not available. If you share my time zone and sleeping habits, this may not be a great option for you.
Enjoy the races!
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American nordic skiing. Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in years one and two of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year three of Nordic Insights for you to be reading now: I was okay with working for very little money to get this love letter to American cross-country skiing off the ground, but I didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing so. If you would like to support what remains a brutally shoestring operation, last season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
