The king of the middle distance – Thierry Gueorgiou – is back after taking a break at the WOC in Denmark. He has done three extremely good races, and showed that nobody can beat him in this technical terrain – neither on the sprint, the long distance, or on his speciality the middle distance. This also gave Gueorgiou the overall victory in this years World Cup, ahead of Daniel Hubmann who ran together with Gueorgiou for most of the course.
Gueorgiou took the lead at the first radio control, just 14 seonds ahead of Valentin Novikov. Daniel Hubmann again had a bad start, and came together with Gueorgiou already before the first radio control.
The hardest competition for Gueorgiou today was Novikov – who also had company – he caught up with Holger Hott Johansen at the first radio control, and together they set up a tremendous speed on the way to the second radio control – which nobody could match except for king of the middle distance – Gueorgiou – who lost 22 seconds to the pair in this area. Thus, now Novikov had the advantage – 8 seconds ahead of Gueorgiou.
However, Novikov lost more than a minute between the second radio control and the prewarning – and the victory again went to the fantastic french runner, 1.17 ahead of Novikoc and 1.56 ahead of Hubmann.
As Gueorgiou headed into the forest, the swede David Andersson just run into the finish and took a clear lead, 1.45 ahead of the former leader Carl Waaler Kaas of Norway. – I’m very satisfied with my race today. I made just a small mistake on the 4th control, about 20. It was a very difficult race but i took it easy enough. I like very much middle distance, especially when it’s very technical like this, Andersson said after his race – which in the end gave him the fourth place.
A little sidestep in the end: It is going to be interesting to hear what Holger Hott Johansen has to say about his run today, where he must have been around Novikov for large parts of the course, as Hott Johansen was indeed very hard towards everybody running together on his blog yesterday.
Unofficial results: