Aino-Kaisa Saarinen enjoys a perfect day

Anssi Koivuranta has to wait a while to fulfil his own medal dreams

print this

Athletes often talk about "good days" and "bad days". Both of them come along fairly regularly in a sporting career. For Aino-Kaisa Saarinen, Thursday in Liberec was off the chart in the "perfect day" department: she won her first individual medal in a major championship, and immediately struck gold.
      Saarinen led the field for most of the women's 10 kilometres classic event, which opened the World Championships. She eventually finished 4.2 seconds ahead of Marianna Longa of Italy, and the bronze medal went to Justyna Kowalczyk of Poland.
     
Though this was Saarinen's first real moment in the spotlight, she was by no means a surprise winner: this season she has performed consistently well on the World Cup circuit, and narrowly leads the overall table.
      She also has relay medals from the 2007 World Championships and the 2006 Olympics, and was placed second - behind Finnish teammate Virpi Kuitunen - in this year's prestigious Tour de Ski event.
      On Thursday, the roles were reversed, and Kuitunen came home some 17 seconds adrift of Saarinen, and just outside the medals in fourth place.
      Finland's Pirjo Muranen also performed well to take 7th place, just over a minute behind the winner.
     
Finnish fans had hoped for a double gold opening to the World Championships, with hot favourite Anssi Koivuranta providing the additional hardware in the Nordic Combined event.
      Koivuranta played his part, finishing fifth in the skiing component over 10km, but was unable to follow through on this - he is now strongly fancied to win, as he is an excellent ski-jumper - because the ski-jumping had to be postponed owing to strong winds and thick snow coming down.
     
The snow had in fact helped Koivuranta somewhat on the tracks, since the heavy conditions meant that the fastest skiers were not able to benefit, and distances between the finishers were small.
      In effect, Koivuranta is within a metre (on the ski-jumping hill) of current leader Todd Lodwick of the United States.
      Of late, the Finn has been in such dominant form on the hill that seemingly only a fall can stand between him and the top of the podium.
     
Some idea of his dominance came in Thursday's practice jumps: Koivuranta touched down at 106.5 metres, while Lodwick, for instance, managed 91.5 and Magnus Moan of Norway, another strong medal candidate, could only reach 87.5 metres.
      The ski-jumping competition will be held at 17:00 Finnish time.
     
     
UPDATE: Matti Heikkinen produced Finland's second medal at the World Championships on Friday, winning a surprise bronze in the men's 15km classic event, where he finished behind Andrus Veerpalu of Estonia and Lukas Bauer from the host country, the Czech Republic.
      Heikkinen made the most out of difficult and challenging conditions, and held off the challenge of 4th-placed Kris Freeman (USA) by a couple of seconds.
      It was the 25-year-old's first-ever podium place in international competition: Heikkinen's previous best showing was 4th in a FIS World Cup event in January.
      Of the other two Finnish entrants, Sami Jauhojärvi was 12th after problems with his selection of skis and Ville Nousiainen retired after 5km.
     
     
Links to Saarinen's, Kuitunen's and Koivuranta's pages on the FIS site are given in Thursday's article.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  FIS Nordic Ski World Championships kick off in Liberec, Czech Republic (19.2.2009)

Links:
  Liberec 2009
  Matti Heikkinen on the FIS site

Helsingin Sanomat