By Devin L. Ward
This article will be updated later today with athlete quotes once we get anything back from the USSS press officer on site. Long day over there, to put it mildly; they’ve got a lot going on.
The Tour de Ski ended today with the mass start Alpe Cermis 10-kilometer skate. This notorious (in nordic skiing terms) course begins with 6.8 kilometers of relatively flat terrain before heading up an alpine slope with a gradient reaching nearly 30% to gain 550 meters. Sophia Laukli won last year’s edition with a dominant performance and time of 38:16.5.
While you might think that the impending climb would lead to a conservative start, Therese Johaug, for not the first time in her career, didn’t get that memo and immediately set off at a stiff pace with Heidi Weng tucked in behind her. That stiff pace may have been the reason we did not see any sprinters gunning to grab the last available points for the overall sprint podium at 6.8km. Nadine Fähndrich won the sprint overall (80 points), with Jasmi Joensuu in second (62 points), and Jessi Diggins in third (51 points).
The field was already strung out seven minutes into the race, captured by a camera mounted at the back of a snowmobile. As someone who spent some of my childhood in a sled attached to the back of a snowmobile, I’m glad that the technology has evolved to provide World Cup camera crews with electric snowmachines so that the athletes do not have a steady diet of two-stroke exhaust before a hard climb.
Some technology could still use some evolution, however; the microphone attached to the camera was not good. The sound coming over the stream might as well have been played out of a 2004 Motorola Razr.
When the climb began around 17 minutes into the race, Johaug continued to drill the pace. Ebba Andersson and Heidi Weng bravely hung onto Johaug for the first third of the climb, before Johaug danced her way away off the front.
Astrid Øyre Slind didn’t attempt to stay with Johaug to fight for the top spot in the overall Tour ranking, focusing instead on maintaining her second place in the overall ranking and staying with Jessie Diggins. Likewise, Diggins maintained her third place in the overall ranking, skiing ahead of Kerttu Niskanen (fourth overall), squashing any thoughts of Finnish resurrection before they reached Niskanen’s mind. Ebba Andersson and Heidi Weng paid for their early pace and were caught by Slind’s masterful pacing and Norway’s Nora Sanness.
Johaug finished (35:59.0) well ahead and with enough spare energy to grab a (pretty big) Norwegian flag and stand, waving it enthusiastically across the finish line. Slind bested the rest (second, +25.5) and was followed by Weng (third, +28.0), who showed that “sprinters” can also climb.
Laukli appeared to make an attempt to move to the front during the slight downhill before the climb (we saw her peeking around the edge of the field), but she never found herself in contention for the lead. She finished more than ten seconds faster than her 2024 performance.
Following up a career-best distance result yesterday, Julia Kern finished 19th (+3:01.2).
Diggins lost time to the Norweigians at the front, but maintained her placing ahead of Niskanen. She saved enough energy to accelerate up the lower-gradient incline to the finish (sixth, +54.3), where she collapsed politely to the side to leave room for others to collapse as well. Diggins successfully defended her overall third in the Tour de Ski rankings (+2:30.3). She is the unchallenged dominant world leader in the Tour de Collapse rankings.
Johaug wins her fourth overall Tour de Ski, followed by Slind in second (+47.5). Johaug (114 points) and Slind (66 points) also ended up first and second, respectively, for the climbing overall ranking, with Kerttu Niskanen in third (46 points).
I’m sure that some will have preferred this race to be a pursuit, so that the first woman across the line will be the one who wins the Tour, but hear me out. This is a weird race with two clear story lines: the fight for the overall tour ranking and the battle to see what absolute machine is capable of skiing up an alpine slope. Leaving the Alpe Cermis as a mass start allows us to see both of those storylines in a way that I don’t think is quite so clear with a pursuit. We also get to see some athletes truly shine in a way that we don’t see in other distance races. This year, we have had a good crop of climbers who were also in contention for the overall, I think, interconnecting both of these storylines in a nice way. Please don’t throw things at me.
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