Ruka Nordic Opening kicks off ski-jumping and Nordic Combined season

Eight Finns in Saturday's ski-jumping competition

Matti Hautamäki

Virpi Kuitunen

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The FIS World Cup for cross-country skiing, ski-jumping, and the Nordic Combined event gets under way properly this weekend with a competition at the Ruka resort in Kuusamo that features a total of eight events in the three disciplines.
      In fact the skiers got their campaign started at Gällivare (Jällivaara) in Sweden a week ago, but this is the first big event of the season, and will bring together the top names in all three sports in search of World Cup points.
     
Friday's programme has a ski-jumping team competition on the HS142 hill, and the ski-jumpers will also be in action on Saturday in an individual event on the same hill.
      Saturday will further see a Nordic Combined competition with ski-jumping followed by a 10km ski race, and the men and women skiers both go in heats, semi-finals and finals of a cross-country sprint event.
      On Sunday the women ski 10km and the men 15km, and the Nordic Combined competitors have a repeat of their Saturday programme.
     
The qualifications for the individual ski-jumping were held on Thursday, and the Finnish contingent perfomed well - no fewer than eight Finns made it into Saturday's final, with Matti Hautamäki producing the best jump - though not the longest - of all the qualifiers.
      Also making the grade were Kalle Keituri, Harri Olli (making a return to the Finnish squad after a disciplinary absence), Ville Larinto, Jussi Hautamäki, Tami Kiuru, Mika Kauhanen, and Sami Niemi.
     
Among the skiers, most eyes will probably be on the women, and on reigning World Cup champion Virpi Kuitunen.
      Her colleague Aino-Kaisa Saarinen was a promising 3rd in the opening race of the season in Sweden, while Kuitunen could do no better than 13th.
      Riitta-Liisa Roponen also made a bright start to her 2008-2009 campaign with an 8th-place finish in Gällivare, and the Finnish women's relay team came home a close 2nd behind Norway.
     
Kuitunen had to face questions about public attitudes to the sport rather than her own prospects for the season when she met the press on Thursday.
      She was asked her opinion on a recent survey that suggested more than half of the Finns felt that Finland's cross-country skiers were using some form of doping.
      Kuitunen said she thought it was "sad" that people held this view, even though there was no evidence to back it up. Some 57% of respondents to a study by TNS Gallup commissioned by several newspapers said they did not believe the current crop of skiers were clean. Only 31% would give them a clean bill of health.
     
The subject of doping has seldom been far from the headlines ever since the unfortunate case in 2001 when six top Finnish skiers were caught using a banned plasma expander at the Nordic World Championships in Lahti.
      The recriminations, charges, and countercharges have rumbled on ever since, colouring public opinion and even threatening the financial security of the sport, as sponsors sought to distance themselves from any taint.


Links:
  Ruka
  Ruka Nordic Opening
  FIS pages

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