Men set for ultimate test

By Gideon Long

PRAGELATO, Italy (Reuters) – The men’s 50-km cross-country
skiing race is to the Winter Olympics what the marathon is to
the summer Games — the ultimate endurance test which can
reduce elite athletes to exhausted rag dolls.

On Sunday the race returns to the Olympics and promises to
be as epic as ever.

Several dozen men will spend over two hours plowing up and
down wooded tracks in the Italian Alps, trying to outwit and
outski each other, possibly in mist and driving snow and
undoubtedly in pain.

Italy’s Giorgio Di Centa, Lukas Bauer of the Czech
Republic, France’s Vincent Vittoz and Mathias Fredriksson of
Sweden are among the favorites, but this is a difficult race to
call, partly because it is staged so infrequently.

Sunday’s race is freestyle, but for most of its Olympic
life, the 50-km race has been raced in the classical style, in
which the athletes cannot skate.

Only in 1988, when it was won by Sweden’s Gunde Svan, and
in 1992 and 1998, when Norway’s great Winter Olympian Bjoern
Daehlie took the gold, has it been raced in freestyle.

LONG HISTORY

One way or the other, the event has been on the Winter
Olympic program since the inaugural Games in Chamonix in 1924,
when Norway swept the podium.

Four years later in St Moritz, the Swedes took all three
medals, with Per Erik Hedlund winning by nearly 13 and a half
minutes — a record that still stands.

In 1932 it was staged in a raging blizzard at Lake Placid
while in Calgary in 1988, officials thought one of the athletes
had got lost and dispatched a search party to find him.

Mexico’s Roberto Alvarez was eventually traced, still
plodding around the Olympic course on his own. He finished
nearly an hour and 20 minutes behind the winner.

Daehlie’s victory in 1998 gave him the eighth gold medal of
his career but, after beating Sweden’s Niklas Jonsson by just
8.1 seconds, he described the race as the toughest of his life.

Four years ago in Salt Lake City, the 50-km race reverted
to classical and was won by Johann Muehlegg, a German who skied
for Spain after falling out with the German ski federation.

Later, however, Muehlegg tested positive for the banned
substance darbepoetin and was stripped of his medal, which went
to Mikhail Ivanov of Russia.

Sunday’s race at Pragelato starts at 10:00 a.m. (0900 GMT)
and is the penultimate event on the Olympic program.

It also gives Norway, the most successful nation in the
discipline, a final chance to win a cross-country gold medal to
salvage something from a disappointing Games.