Under 30 minutes

[Magnus Johansson]

In today's World Cup race for men over 15 km in free style in Toblach, Italy, Simen Hegstad Krüger, won with a time of 29.58. I believe this to be the first 15 km World Cup race with a winning time of under 30 minutes, meaning Simen had an average speed of a little over 30 km/h on that challenging course. Very impressive.

[dcpattie]

Downhill?

[Magnus Johansson]

Downhill?

Ha, ha! No, cross-country with massive climbs. But one may wonder how fast they skied in the downhill parts of the course. Maybe 60-70 km/h.

[Neuro]

It's really incredible

[JeffOYB]

...and the commenters don't even mention it? ...and there are no cameras on downhills? what the heck? if they're going 50mph somewhere i wish we could've seen it!

[Neuro]

Yeah i know. TV production is typically quite poor. Long shot from the front going up a hill is what we normally get to see (annoyingly cut to close-ups during race deciding moments). Today we could easily have overlay of GPS data showing speed as well.

About XC average speeds. Surely faster than running and slower than biking, but how does it compare to for example mountain biking? Anyone know?

[liège]

I'm guessing the speed in the new downhill section on race day was minimum 70kph/44mph in the new, big downhill. A certain Afton, MN native and an Estonian wax tech working for Russian both hit 70.6kph on Wednesday ... and at least one of those was on classic skis with CH6 and no structure. There was some new snow Friday, but the tracks were firm and fast for both races.

I didn't see Saturday's race, but the camera set-up didn't appear to be set to show how fast that hill was. Sunday's race had a lot more camera positions, and a helicopter flying around, so hopefully that will show things off a bit better.