February 26, 2009 (Harbin, China) – It was again a superb sunny day in Yabuli but with a really cold and changing wind. These conditions were very hard for the Cross Country skiers competing in both Men and Women’s relay. The Russian team reached the top once again. Indeed, during the Men’s relay, Konstantin Glavatskikh, Egor Sorin, Sergey Turichev and Aleksey Tchernousov gained the gold medal. They took the lead after the second relay (they had two classical relays and two free relays). Egor, Sergey and Alexey, just put the fire on the track. They were simply too strong as they managed to cross the finish line with a gap of more than two minutes! Japan took the bronze medal and the Czech Republic finished third.

The women’s race started with a big battle between Yulia Tchekaleva from Russia and Bettina Gruber from Switzerland during the first and only classical relay. The Russian machine began to work during the second relay. Indeed, Marina Chernousova took the lead and kept it till the last relay. Valentina Novikova finished the race with 57 seconds of advantage. Ukrainian girls finished second and France took the bronze medal thanks to the fantastic last relay of Pauline Caprini.

The Ski Jumping competition ended today with the Team K90 event. The organizers had to postpone the event several times because of the wind but finally they had a chance to go through with it and the competition could take place in good conditions. Once again, the Koreans, the Austrians and the Germans were the strongest on the hill. The Koreans took the gold medal thanks to their regularity.

Biathlon: Russian and Ukrainian Pursuit

The Biathlon Pursuit event is easy to understand: you start in the same position as the one obtained after the sprint competition. This means that the winner of the 10km sprint men, the Russian Artem Gusev was the first to take the start 2 seconds before the Ukrainian Oleg Berezhnoy and 27 seconds before the Czech Jaroslav Soukup. In fact the race for the podium went only between those three biathletes. Despite 4 penalties loops, Gusev came together with Berezhnoy (1 penalty loop) for the last of 4 shootings. But the Russian missed the target four times and will never see the end winner Berezhnoy again. Gusev despite 8 missed shots was quite happy to clinch the silver medal after beating Soukup in the last sprint.

We knew that after the tight results of the sprint competition, the women pursuit was going to be panting. Three Polish girls were ahead before the last 5 standing shots but they could not resist to the pressure. Anna Kunaeva, the winner of the 15km, came from behind to win the gold before the surprising Chinese Yuan Yuan Liu and Weronika Novakowska from Poland.

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