Discussion: World Cup #3 in Italy starting tomorrow

Long Start times for Thursday have been posted on Eventor.
Starting in the Long for the USA:
Tori Borish
Ricardo Schaniel
Thomas Laraia
Starting for Canada:
Christian Michelsen

World Cup debut for Christian?

Let's just hope he gets to the start line with both shoes

And a working compass

Wishful thinking

With 19.2km/850m for the men and terrain which looks less than straightforward, a winning time of 100 seems ambitious.

Thomas is finished, in ~2 1/2 hours. Ricardo & Christian are MP (probably just DNF; that course looks brutal). Tori is still running as I write this.

Men's winning time 99.51 - 9 sec under the predicted time. Can't get much more accurate than that.

I was also ready to bet the over.
More-than-normal running in the yellow, but the white forest must be super white, and the ground firm (not Nordic soft) as well.

...and Tove was 59 seconds over predicted winning time - victory margin 6 minutes!

The forest is beech (according to the Bulletins) which is always super fast forest - no undergrowth at all. The map sample in the WoO article shows very rocky complex karst terrain but that was misleading. Most of the terrain in that area (Cansiglio) is not that complex - as you could see if you looked at the old maps linked to in the bulletins.

Obviously the middle will be in the complex karst area to the east of the long finish

3km of the course was in full yellow too, which makes a difference.

Was unbelievably quick woods, and Christian did make it with both shoes, but perhaps not on time and with borrowed compass :o

These days it is very common for WC/ WOC, etc courses to have a lot of dead running. It is inevitable as soon you to decide to have things like a finish area pass though . 2.5km (3km seems a bit of an over estimate) is perhaps a bit more than usual but when the woods are that fast, running in full yellow is not going to be all that much faster. Also having the start 100m above the finish speeds things up a bit.

A 19km course with so little route choice: the WoO summary only found two legs worth analyzing.

I was guessing the times would be fast even if the course had more of the complex stuff. The woods seemed very fast and expected the footing to be good. I haven’t run in Italy but they didn’t set 19K by accident.

I didn’t look at the course carefully or WorldOfO but I wouldn’t expect many around route choices.

Given how fast the woods are you wont get many route choice problems based on running wide to avoid poor runnability - but there were enough big hills out there to be able to set some more good route choice legs I would have thought.

Mature beech forest has indeed typically less undergrows due to its thick crown.
This alone does not make terrain super fast or even fast.
A classical example is Bucovina forest (literally "the Land of Beech Trees").
Footing is tough, soft, terrain is steep and shows strong erosion with layers shifted.

Middle Start Times for the North Americans
Giacomo 10:55
Ricardo 11:27
Thomas 12:07
Alison 12:18
Christian 12:31
Tori 13:12
Didn't realize that all get GPS tracking? - never mind, does not look like they all do...

Kasper Fossers run was astonishing.
- fastest time on 21 legs
- biggest time loss on ANY leg to the fastest time was 20sec (28-29), 20sec (3-4), then 10sec (30-31), 7 sec (20-21), 6 sec (finish chute!).
- total time loss to superman was 81sec over a 100min course.

The course seemed much easier than expected and I thought the route choice options were not very interesting for the most part. Makes his performance even more remarkable given on the technically easy forest legs he was clearly in a different league running speed wise. I wonder what sort of times he could do on the road or track or over a cross country course.

Tove was similarly dominant too. I guess from her it's now almost expected though. Like Fosser, her consistency was amazing.

somehow "Bukovina forest" evokes an array of four-pronged 9K37M1 TELARs carnivorously scanning the sky for a stray 777

What a performance from Per Forsberg! On his feet for about 5 hours. Does he have a bucket stashed under that table?

Now its over, are we going to hear the story of Christian's shoes?

Exciting finish for the sprint relay. Was there a mis-step by Sweden or did it come down to the forking?

@DickO - as someone who was working just a few metres away I can say "no", no bucket. But he certainly misjudged the rather chilly wind in the shade under the tent when he came in Bermuda shorts!