taywood wrote:

Terje Mathisen wrote:

Hey! The world cup started this weekend, with nice skiing (and
weather!) on saturday and relays (in not so nice weather) yesterday.

The British commentators on Eurosport both have Biathlon
background and observed that Norway have given their
Biathlon racers the chance to take part in XC races.

It really isn't a matter of 'Norway giving Bi racers the chance', it is
simply that those biathlon racers have started in the regular (skate)
qualification race(s), and beaten most of the XC squad. Kristen
Skjeldal, who was dropped from the XC team before this season did the
same, and qualified the same way.

As this seems a new concept does anyone know why this happened.
I can understand that Bi racers would welcome on snow racing
prior to their season starting, but surely the XC squads need
their race time on snow now.

They sure do, but the bi racers are so popular currently that there's
absolutely no way the XC coaches can bypass them when they do qualify.
They've tried that in previous years, and they got hung up to dry in all
the tabloid newspapers, as well as on NRK TV.

It probably helps that the main XC commentator, Kjell Kristian Rike, has
a background as a competition shooter, and really do prefer Biathlon.

He's been extolling the skating virtues of the best biathlon racers for
years and years now, and during the last couple of seasons, he's even
been right.

Terje

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"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"