Doping in XC skiing

[AmRacer]

Just watching a replay of the women's 50km - what a ridiculous first lap. All I could think of was Mühlegg *** ing off in the 30km in 2002 lol

It has been like this for many years.

 

[Eddy Evenepoel]

And in the Scandinavian Tour a few years ago they were as blatant as having a point-to-point race in heavy snow where they put machines out to clear the tracks right in front of their own skiers.

A lot of good points, but this is very wrong. The point-to-point race during the Scandinavian Tour in was not raced in heavy snow and Bolshunov won that race solo (search for ‘Bolshunov Meråker’ on YouTube for the summary of that race). There were some «Machines» involved in this race as they had camera scooters being just in front of the leaders and technically would give some draft. I don’t know if that happened in the women’s class as well, but in the FIS summary video on YouTube you can see that Bolshunov is going very close to the scooter after he dropped the last Norwegians, so the machines was not there to benefit the home skiers..

I think the snowfall race you think about is the chasing start in Trondheim. It was on the normal laps and Bolshunov lost a clear lead because he had klister and the Norwegian did not. I think he lost like more than 2 minutes and it was a complete wax fiasco from the Russians. However I don’t remember seeing any machinery out in the course that day, and it also doesn’t make any practical sense at all to “clear the tracks” with machinery ahead of the skiers as the snow need time to settle after being groomed. If you send out the grooming machines a minute ahead of the skiers during snowfall it should only lead to the course collapsing and being much more soft and worse conditions than if you have a couple of centimeters fresh snow on top of solid tracks.

So I think this point about Norway sending out machinery to clean the tracks for the home athletes are somewhat of a fake memory. I just wanted to point that out, as there are enough real things (like asthma misuse, pushing rules with ski testing/waxing etc, course design in Trondheim and so on) to be angry with.