Discussion: World Cup in France

It seems Boris had a decent Qualifying race today at the World Cup Final Round. Thierry is back in his good old shape - starting a new streak in the Middle (?) - and winning his heat with a huge margin.

Sorry for leaving the ladies out of my first post: Sandra and Victoria were both a little further behind than Boris.
You´ll see all results at the link posted above.

appear as that the location where they got the radio control, or the results are not right. at 2.1 k Jarkko have 23.05 and then 2k later at the finish he's listed as 27.55. hard to believe that at an O_ world cup somebody can pull 4.50 for the last 2 k(2.25min/km) of the course, after spending over 10 min/km for the first half. probably is just a time delay at radio , some organizers mistake , or we are heading for world records.

PS and it's not only Jarkko's time like that.

Who's that Haldin cat Boris is smacking around?

We have arrived and are doing well. Middle distance qualifier today, the woods are incredibly technical, and also green with limited visibility, luckily Viktora and I both in the A final, but just barely, Boris just out, unfortunately. Viktoria had a solid run with no large mistakes, but she was careful the whole way. Boris felt like he was too careful and was somewhat disappointed, he had a good time though. I had a good race up (but still careful) until the third last control, then took a risk and lost 6 minutes searching around, stupid!
Middle distance final tomorrow! Viktoria at 10:03, I am at 10:07, Boris at 1310.

Sounds exciting! Good luck tomorrow. We'll all be waiting anxiously for the results :)

Good luck! We'll be holding our thumbs!

Ummm.... that, I believe, is an idiom that doesn't translate...

I think it is the same as crossing your fingers.

Yes, 'holding our thumbs' translates well into Swedish - we use the same idiom - and it is as Jeff already pointed out the same as 'crossing your fingers'...
Oh, well - good luck anyway! I heard tomorrow is going to be an even more technical race.

Are you supposed to hold your thumbs with the fingers of the same hand? Or the opposite hand?

Either way, I'll give it a try.

'Holding our thumbs' translates well into Finnish also. We don't hold thumbs with fingers, we just hold/keep our thumbs pointing up, like they used to do at the Rome 2000 years ago. http://www.turunurheiluliitto.fi/yu/ts/muu14i.html

And we cross our fingers only when we lie.

Well the weather over in France was so bad this morning that they've stopped the Middle Final part way through! A nice storm over there by the sound of things - from the live site:

"We have... very bad weather conditions (100 km/h wind)"

and trees falling down left, right and centre in the forest apparently - a major concern for runners' safety and hence the cancellation - looks like it might be re-run Friday morning. How you can re-run a race that some have already started is an interesting problem...

if you guys are interested in more thumb "translations" in Bulgaria is used as "squeeze our thumbs", but I can't remember which way exactly it is done, may be it is just saying.

Well, maybe next time I will only cross my fingers. First the race was cancelled because of the storm and when the US team finally arrived at home, they had to move because their accomodation wasn't secure anymore (wind or water risks, don't know the reason).
It must have been really dramatic out there.

The middle distance final is rescheduled on Friday. Hopefully Boris can change his flight back... he's supposed to fly on Friday from Geneva around 12.
Tomorrow there will only be the sprint final and no qualification.

Holding the thumb is done by making a fist and pressing the thumb. This prevents people from doing anything stupid.

Idioms like this are tricky. In German it is "falling on your nose", while here the expression is "falling flat on your face".

Anywway, this spell didn't work in France. The region is famous for ferocious weather. Two Swiss women were pulled in the middle of the race. Next thing, they said,was that a tree fell right behind them, so they run back as fast as they could. Some runners in the men's race needed almost twice as long for their course than planned, until their race was stopped.

Of course Tero would be used to this kind of stuff and would have won easily.

Some photos of our folks at the WC in France (not sure who took these - from the official WC page)

Middle Qualifier
Boris and Sandra in the team tents
Neil Dobbs
Andrew Quin
Ivan Millar or Alan Barry
Ivan Millar or Alan Barry
Ivan Millar or Alan Barry
Boris

Cancelled Middle Final
Annabel
Sandra
Sandra
Sandra

Sprint
Ivan Millar or Alan Barry
Andrew Quin
Ivan Millar or Alan Barry
Neil Dobbs (in background)
Holger
Holger
Toni O'Donovan (in background, Heli Jukkola in front)

All of the official WC photos here.

The middle distance guys did very well in the sprint!

Tero! He trained doing about 1000 controls in the neighboring woods. I guess he wanted to win for sure.

The long distance has started... and it looks like the terrain is again incredibly difficult. There are hudge time differences between the runners. Unfortunately I am afraid it will give quite an unfair race as there will be lots of packs of runners. Because 2 minute interval seem to be peanuts in relativity to the slowness of the terrain... for most runners you better hope to be in a group, and in a good one...
In green, slow terrain you are so much faster if you are more than two eyes to check out for a control and more than 1 brain to avoid concentration mistakes

So did the WC go OK with no qualifications?
Was it still exciting?

Because if it did go well and it was exciting it raises an interesting question about the need for qualification races. I believe that Holger Hott Johansen is on record as stating that they aren't necessary or that the week of racing would be more interesting without them - allowing more of the big names to race in more of the disciplines.

Tero is on a mission.

Photos from today's WC Long final
Holger
Andrew
Viktoria
Eddie Wymer (AUS)

All of the official WC photos here.

Wow, everyone looks pretty trashed... those pictures, plus the results list, make it look like that was pretty tough going.

This looks pretty difficult!

Tero, part 1
Tero, part 2

It´s very understandable that many of the 'stars' made huge mistakes today (for example Hubmann, Wingstedt and Modig made 15-20 minute errors...).

Wow, look at all those spectators!

Spectators? Maybe they wanted to see more hobbyist athletes.

Seriously, you'd think "hobbyist" athletes would provide *more* entertainment, especially if you tractrac'd them. Watching a gps dot spike every control isn't nearly as interesting as seeing the little dots go in circles here and there.

If that's all you want to see, you can watch me play catching features sometime...

Also, it's nice to see in the picture above that Boris isn't above showing a little leg at the WC races to get some style points.

That is a pretty nice slit he has going on there.

That map is awesome.

Photos from today's WC Middle final
Neil
IRL
Annabel
Viktoria
Andrew

Looks like Boris and Sandra didn't run today. Hope they aren't injured.

Boris and I couldn't take part in the middle final because we had travel arrangements for Friday originally and couldn't get them changed when the middle got rescheduled for Friday. Too bad, we both would have wanted another chance to get it right in these very difficult woods.