One widely-anticipated gold medal - and a surprise bronze

Women's sprint team dedicate win to controversial coach

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Wednesday brought two more medals for the Finnish contingent at the Nordic Skiing World Championships in Liberec. Both were in the sprint relays, but they could hardly have come in more different fashion.
      The women's pairing of Aino-Kaisa Saarinen and Virpi Kuitunen were hot favourites for the event, raced over six legs of 1.3 kilometres each. They are both outstanding classic-style skiers, and as a duo they were expected to deliver Finland's most "given" medal at these games, especially as Saarinen (two earlier individual medals) had already shown she has lost none of the form she has displayed in the World Cup this season.
     
Even so, the margin of their victory was something of a surprise.
      Saarinen set about breaking the field on her first stint, and handed over to Kuitunen with a comfortable lead and some very uncomfortable rivals.
      Kuitunen expanded the advantage to 13 seconds, and basically that was it: when Kuitunen completed her final leg, she came home 20 seconds ahead of the Swedish pairing, with Italy taking the bronze medals a further four seconds adrift.
     
The win preserves a nice Finnish record: ever since this particular event was introduced at the World Championships in 2005, the Finnish women have taken some kind of medal. On that first occasion it was a silver, then Wednesday's duo took a bronze medal at the Torino Olympics, and two years ago Kuitunen and Riitta-Liisa Roponen won gold (though that time it was in the freestyle discipline).
     
Afterwards, Saarinen said she and Kuitunen were dedicating their victory to personal coach Jarmo Riski, whom she described as "the world's best coach".
      This remark was sure to raise eyebrows and some hackles, since Riski - formerly the head coach of the Finnish women's team - was sacked and given a lifetime ban in the wake of the doping scandal that engulfed the Finnish team at the 2001 World Championships.
      The Finnish Ski Association lifted the ban in 2004, but it remains in force internationally.
     
If the women enjoyed a smooth ride to victory, then the bronze medal taken shortly afterwards by Ville Nousiainen and Sami Jauhojärvi was anything but clear-cut.
      This race went right down to the wire, and Norway's margin of victory over the German pairing was just 0.5 seconds.
      Nousiainen as the Finnish anchor was within a few metres of the gold medal and an agonising few centimetres of the silver - the stopwatch could not distinguish between his time and that of Germany's Axel Teichmann, and even the photo-finish camera had trouble separating them.
      In fact, this was a race par excellence, with any one of about seven countries in with a shout at the death. Sixth-placed Sweden were only 4.3 seconds behind the winner.
     
Wednesday's results boosted Finland into 3rd place in the medals table, with two golds and four bronze medals.
      All have come so far from the cross-country skiers. The fact that the women have delivered comes as little surprise, given results earlier this season, but the men's performance - Matti Heikkinen also took a bronze medal in the 15km race - is a pleasant surprise after several years in the doldrums (yet another knock-on effect of the disasters of Lahti 2001).
     
More hardware is probably to come: the women's 4 x 5km relay team look to be a solid bet in today's competition, always assuming Saarinen and Kuitunen have something left in the tank. They will join up with Pirjo Muranen (bronze in the individual sprint) and Riitta-Liisa Roponen.
      And sooner or later, surely, the Finnish Nordic Combined and ski-jumping representatives will have to break their duck.
      So far the best performances on that side have been Anssi Koivuranta's two fourth-place finishes and Ville Larinto's 7th on the HS100 metre hill.
      The Nordic Combined team event, with jumps on the big HS134 metre hill and a freestyle relay of 4 x 5 km, comes later today. Finland are the defending champions, and Koivuranta at least will be desperate to salvage something from a games that were expected to bring much more than they have so far.
     
The ski-jumpers, meanwhile, will occupy the big hill on Friday.
      Harri Olli has an individual silver medal from Sapporo 2007 to defend, and he will also be eager to erase the disappointment of finishing 13th on the normal hill after holding all the cards to win the event.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Pirjo Muranen adds sprint bronze medal (25.2.2009)
  Liberec: Saarinen adds to medals haul, but Koivuranta and Olli miss out (23.2.2009)

Links:
  Liberec 2009
  FIS pages

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