Cross-Country Skiing at the Winter Olympic Games Beijing 2022

[heywoodu 15,335]

  On 2/19/2022 at 5:58 AM, Pifta said:

Why was 50k shortened and delayed? Wind has big effect in biathlon, but not in cross country skiing 

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It does when it's already that cold. Keep them going for 2 hours and it's just asking for people to drop down out of the blue.

[JonPhi 250]

  On 2/19/2022 at 5:58 AM, Pifta said:

Why was 50k shortened and delayed? Wind has big effect in biathlon, but not in cross country skiing 

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The feeling temperature is -25 and there is it a lot of wind and the course is already very brutal. At a 50k many athletes would not see the finish

[Vektor 3,326]

They simply can't have a 50k race today if they have to start with a one hour delay. The race would be much longer than usual due to the conditions, so if you add the one hour delay, the race would finish well beyond anything we have seen for long distance cross-country events at these Games, especially for the weaker athletes, who might as well DNF already just to save the energy. 

[Orangehair43 254]

Couldn’t they move it to tomorrow at say 11am Bejing time?

[Pifta 41]

  On 2/19/2022 at 6:32 AM, Orangehair43 said:

Couldn’t they move it to tomorrow at say 11am Bejing time?

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they said skiers and organizers want to leave Beijing this evening

[NearPup 3,197]

  On 2/19/2022 at 6:33 AM, Pifta said:

they said skiers and organizers want to leave Beijing this evening

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That was also a problem with the alpine skiing team event - they considered cancelling it today because many skiers have flights booked for Sunday morning, and all the Monday flights are apparently booked.

[JonPhi 250]

I don't understand all the excitement here. The temperatures are at the absolute limit with -17/-18 degrees, plus winds over 10 m/s, which make the whole thing significantly colder again towards -25. Then we already have brutally difficult courses and an altitude of 1800 meters. 
It is also about the health of the athletes, one will have little interest in that as in the biathlon at these temperatures here athletes collapse on the track or half does not come to the finish.

And postpone the race until tomorrow? Due to the Alpine postponement runs tomorrow morning already some parallel, so already times not in the interest of the TV stations. And do you know how cold it is there at 10 o'clock local time when the sun has just come out? Even colder! And the wind is supposed to be even stronger tomorrow than today.

[Pifta 41]

Why do skiiers leave Beijing on saturday evening/sunday morning? The closing ceremony is on sunday evening, they should be there

[Orangehair43 254]

The Eurosport commentators are fuming.

[Orangehair43 254]

Double post.