2024-01-06 16:10:37
Teresa Stadlober took an excellent fifth place in the Tour de Ski mass start cross-country skiing over 15 km in Val di Fiemme on Saturday. In classic style, the Salzburg woman stayed in the top field throughout the race and was only three seconds behind the Swedish winner Linn Svahn (53:59.7 mins). Stadlober was only 1.4 seconds short of her first podium finish this season. She thus improved to tenth place in the overall ranking.
However, there was no sense of success for Mika Vermeulen in the men’s competition. The 24-year-old stayed in the top field for long stretches, but was unable to fight at the front in the finish and had to settle for 32nd place (+16.7 seconds). As a result, the Styrian fell from 13th to 14th place in the overall ranking. The Norwegian Erik Valnes won the day ahead of the Swede William Poromaa (+0.9).
Valnes is 1:34 minutes behind in the overall ranking, the first pursuer of his compatriot Harald Östberg Amundsen, who came sixth on Saturday. Vermeulen is 3:59 minutes short of first place, and a top ten placement is realistically within reach. The final is scheduled for Sunday, with a mass start race over 10 km in skating style on the infamous Alpe Cermis. The men (14.30) start, the women (15.45) follow afterwards.
For Stadlober, fifth place was the second best performance of the season after fourth place at the Skiathlon in Trondheim. “It was an extremely close race and fifth place is of course really cool. We had very difficult and wet conditions today and the course of the race was, to be honest, a bit strange. At the beginning no athlete wanted to run at the front and it was because of the lightness “If it snows, not all tracks will move at the same speed,” Stadlober said in a press release. However, she again had “great material and really fast skis”.
“The standard is simply very high and today you noticed again how close everything is. I’m now tenth in the overall ranking and super happy. It was a relaxed race on one of my favorite routes and tomorrow I’ll give it my all again,” she promised Salzburger.
The overall leader of the Tour de Ski before the final day is still the American Jessie Diggins, who came eighth on Saturday and thus finished just behind Stadlober. Diggins leads ahead of Swedes Jonna Sundling (+43 seconds) and Frida Karlsson (+44). Stadlober is 2:13 minutes behind Diggins and 1:10 minutes behind Heidi Weng (NOR), who is sixth overall. Stadlober was always in the top ten in all six 2.5 km laps and was an excellent contender in the large group of podium contenders. The first eleven runners were within 9.5 seconds at the end.
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