August 29, 2010 – Marcus Hellner won gold in the 2010 Vancouver Olympic pursuit, but claims he doesn’t like pursuit-style races. While these are seemingly contradictory statements, and ones that Hellner has ruffled some feathers with, he stands by them. Despite his success in both pursuit races and mass starts, the Swedish skiing star admits he doesn’t enjoy racing either of them as much as he loves individual starts. He’s even gone so far as to encourage FIS to cut back the number of both pursuits and mass starts in order to allow for more traditional ‘against the clock’ individual start races.

“They might as well remove it completely. I never liked skiathlon, and I won’t change my mind just because I have won Olympic gold,” Hellner told langd.se, explaining that “…the races are noisy and nothing happens until the last mile. I may be stupid not to advocate mass starts because I have done well in them, but I must say what I feel.”

Hellner says he misses the style of racing that he grew up with. “The [mass starts and pursuits] were not the kind of skiing I started with when I was little, when I competed against the clock and did not get squeezed by the pack at the end,” he says.  According to Hellner, “It is sad that there are so few individual starts in the World Cup.” He says he understands that change is necessary, but that the world cup calendar has been changing too fast, getting rid of too many traditional-style races. “It should always be made with some changes, but sometimes I actually think that it goes a bit too fast.”

With files from langd.se