The first weekend of the 2022 Winter Olympics yielded a pair of victories by cross-country skiers more beloved by bettors than spectators.
take full advantage of physics. A bobsleigh, a luge, or a skeleton requires exceptional skill to pilot, but the basic plotline dates from that apple plummeting from a Lincolnshire tree, and the mechanics of gravity mean that it’s very hard for a lay observer to tell much difference between one run and the next.
Clearlygets one sled down the hill a few hundredths of a second faster than the next, but it’s hard to inject muchIt’s more fun to watch the sports that grapple with gravity: the figure skaters trying to stay aloft long enough to land a quad; or the snowboarders who, having dispensed with the mysterious stair rails planted along the slope, go briefly and spectacularly airborne. But it’s only on the cross-country ski trails that athletes face the quintessentially human track of slogging. Some do this with a rifle on their backs for periodic target shooting, and others do it after flying off a ski jump. But in this Olympics the struggle is at its purest on the tracks of the National Cross-Country Skiing Center, in Zhangjiakou, about a hundred miles northwest of Beijing, where the cross-country races are being contested. It is an inauspicious setting. Thousands of newly planted trees look tiny compared with the giant light poles that dominate the scene. Viewed from the air—drones are increasingly key to TV coverage of the sport—it resembles a penal colony in a remote and frozen valley, which is probably not the image that China was aiming for in what some have dubbed the Genocide Olympics. The accounts from the ground are only slightly better: the trails are wide and well-groomed, but all the snow is man-made , and it’s dry and slow in a truly bitter cold that has the skiers shrouding their faces. The wind has been blowing relentlessly, but so far it has not produced anything like the sandstorms that occurred three times last spring,the sky into “a thick ocre haze of desert particulate,” as a large portion of the nearby Gobi Desert relocated. And—at least on the first weekend—this unromantic setting has yielded a pair of workmanlike victories by athletes more beloved by bettors than spectators. The Norwegian Therese Johaug has dominated the women’s field for years—even since she came back from an eighteen-month doping suspension—and she ran away with Saturday’s skiathlon race, which requires racers to switch skis, and techniques, halfway through. The next day, Russia’s Alexander Bolshunov—who is coached by a man who was previously suspended, with other Russian coaches, for his involvement with doping —dominated his race almost from the start. There’s every reason to believe that both athletes are racing clean; Johaug and Norwegian skiing officials blamed her infraction on a steroid-loaded lip balm, and Bolshunov, who on Sundaydoping rumors about Russian athletes, is a classic hard man, putting in a reputed twelve hundred hours of training a year. But they’re both fairly joyless to watch—Johaug because she usually takes the drama out of a race early on with an almost robotic pace, and Bolshunov because he once attacked a rival who had beaten him. So, after the first weekend, the hope is that the sport’s more quicksilver stars may soon flash to the fore. There’s Johannes Klaebo, the fleet Norwegian who dominates the sprints and has shown flashes of speed like nothing the sport has ever seen. Or Frida Karlsson, the young Swedish star who has pipped Johaug in a couple of races. Or, the all-in Minnesotan who took a gold in the women’s team sprint with the Alaskan Kikkan Randall the last time round, in Pyeongchang, the best result ever for Americans in the sport. Now Randall is in the NBC booth, providing color commentary next to the tremendously talented former biathlete Chad Salmela. On Saturday, they watched Diggins’s attempt at a late comeback come up short. She finished sixth, but gave it her everything. As she lay gasping like a beached fish in the snow, Randall said brightly that it was probably just the start her engine needed. Diggins is indeed renowned for her ability to live inside what endurance athletes call “the pain cave.” Of all the skills of a Nordic athlete, that’s the most important. By many accountings, this is the toughest sport on earth, because it uses most muscles. If you’re meandering through the Vermont woods, there’s nothing sweeter—but if you’re climbing steep hills at top speed, the aerobic demands are off the chart. That’s why races often end with half the finishers prone on the ground, and why the closeups along the course often capture a slick of slowly freezing spittle dangling from gaping mouths. Unlike figure skaters, cross-country skiers don’t try to hide the pain involved. If you watch the races, that’s what you’re seeing: bodies working harder than bodies ever work. Going uphill fast in a savage, windy cold requires many things, but grit above all. This weekend, it looked kind of grim, which may be a good fit for these Games. But there are two weeks still to go.
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