SA Runner gets 1st place (in the sprint finish split)

Trondheim has had another wonderful, sunny day during which it hosted the Sprint Qualification and Final races. The team had a mediocre performance today at the Sprint Qualification race, that unsurprisingly didn't see any South Africans qualify.

Pic: The official 2010 team photo in front of our hotel.

Jeremy Green was the first South African runner off, but made mistakes at 1 and 12 saw him fall well down the results board. In the end, he finished 31st (out of 33) in a time of 23:12 (+8:11). Only the top 15 runners qualified for the final. He says that he would have been happy with a sub-20 time without this two big mistakes, placing him around 28th in his heat. The good news is that he kept his spirits up by once again taking the fastest split on the run-in from the last control to the finish on his heat.

Pic: Jeremy Green on his way to the fastest finish split time (Photo by WOC 2010 Organisation)

Nicholas Mulder started a little while later and had a fair race. He was moderately happy, given this is his worst discipline. However, he rued two major route choice mistakes on the course, each costing him 20 seconds when he didn't see the gaps in some impassable fences. He went on to finish in 32nd position (out of 34) in a time of 19:23 (+4:26).

Pic: Nicholas' map of the Sprint Qualification (Heat 1).

Pic: Nicholas Mulder in the run-in at the finish (Photo by WOC 2010 Organisation)

The results put South Africa towards the bottom of the list of countries, something the team is keen to improve on in the forthcoming Middle distance (Monday) and Long distance (Tuesday) qualification races. The team has started keeping score however. Present standings for SA are:

RSA 2 - USA 0 (big smiles here for South Africa!)
RSA 1 - BRA 1
RSA 1 - CHN 1

There are however, numerous scores which read 0 - 2, and which won't be listed here due to possible development of inferiority complexes.

Full results and split times can be seen at the official WOC website here.

In the afternoon, the team spectated at the Sprint Finals. Surprisingly, the final area was technically earlier than the qualification race. Times were thus extremely tight at the top of the leaderboard. The Swiss men dominated, taking 1st and 2nd place (only their first ever Sprint Gold!) with a young Frenchman a surprise 3rd. The overall time difference from 1st place to 7th was only 7 seconds!!! Crazy! In the Ladies, Simone Niggli took yet another gold, this time by the narrowest of margins (0.7 seconds), with only another 5 seconds to 3rd place.

Pic: The river Nidelva where it runs through town, part of the Sprint Final map.

Tomorrow afternoon will be the Middle Distance qualification race. Jeremy starts at 14h30 and Nicholas at 14h56 (CET). Both runners will be aiming to improve on their perfomances of today, with Nicholas hoping to better his historical best position of 27th place (Ukraine 2007). Given that Jeremy's best performance is 38th (Denmark 2006), he will automatically improve just by finishing! The courses are only 3.5km in length (i.e. very slow terrain), with 170m of climb and only 11 controls!

You can follow all the action live at the WOC Live website.