Winter Sports: Virpi Kuitunen wins Tour de Ski in fine style

Hannu Manninen back in front in Nordic Combined rankings

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Virpi Kuitunen overcame back pain on Sunday and defied the pessimists who had said she had missed her opportunity to win the new World Cup event, the Tour de Ski, and she came home a minute and 18 seconds ahead of Mari Björgen of Norway.
      Thanks to victories in the fourth and fifth leg of the Tour, Kuitunen - who had started the event slowly - was able to lead off the field with an advantage of 1:40, but there had been fears that she would collapse on the stiff climb of three kilometres with which the course designers had decided to end the race. This was almost like the end of a mountain stage of the Tour de France, and was in fact a slalom slope - only in reverse. The skiers had to climb more than 400 metres to the finish, on tired legs.
      However, Kuitunen doggedly made her way up the hill and heard that her lead was not being seriously eroded, and she was able to pick up a Finnish flag and celebrate her win - and the record EUR 82,000 in prize money - well before the finishing line.
     
The World Cup points brought by this win - which she has described as the first big target of her season before the World Championships in Sapporo - mean that Kuitunen now has a large lead of 822 points to 634 over Björgen in the overall World Cup standings.
      Aino-Kaisa Saarinen eventually finished 4th in the Tour de Ski, seeing second and third place vanish before her eyes in the final 200 metres. She is in 6th place on the World Cup rankings.
     
Among the men, a small piece of history was made on Saturday, when Sami Jauhojärvi took 3rd place in the 30 kilometres race, a part of the men's own Tour de Ski event.
      It was the first time Jauhojärvi had made the podium, but even more significantly it was the first time that a Finnish male cross-country skier had achieved this feat since the disastrous days of the 2001 World Championships in Lahti, when the Finnish team was decimated in a doping scandal that set back the sport here by several years.
      Jauhojärvi eventually finished the Tour in a creditable 7th spot.
     
On the Nordic combined front, Finland's Hannu Manninen took the lead in the overall World Cup points after finishing second in the 15-kilometre Gundersen event in Oberstdorf, Germany on Saturday.
      The race victory went to Austria's Felix Gottwald, who came in 4.6 seconds ahead of Manninen with Sebastian Haseney of Germany finishing third.
      After seven events Manninen leads the World Cup with 415 points, followed by Austrian Christoph Bieler (396 points), who finished sixth in Oberstdorf. Manninen is no stranger to the position, having won the title for the last three seasons.
      The rest of the Finnish team, as it turned out, produced rather average results with Jaakko Tallus finishing 12th, rising star Anssi Koivuranta 14th, Ville Kähkönen 19th, and Janne Ryynänen 25th.
     
Another Finn to test the steps of the podium at the weekend was Tanja Poutiainen, who finished third in the giant slalom and then fourth in the slalom event, both held in Kranjska Gora in Slovenia.
      Poutiainen has made a fairly slow start to the season, but seems now to be achieving a measure of consistency that bodes well for the remaining World Cup events. The Torino silver medallist is currently in 8th spot in the overall World Cup standings.
      Her male colleague Kalle Palander came close twice at the weekend, but could do no better than fourth on each occasion, in the giant slalom and slalom in Adelboden in Switzerland. Palander is lying sixth in the slalom World Cup and also 6th overall.


Links:
  FIS pages
  Tour de Ski
  FIS-Ski biography: Hannu Manninen

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