December 4, 2009 – When walking around between the athletes and coaches during the first World Cup (WC) weekend, you could almost touch the tension and nervous expectation that come with an Olympic season. While someone is happy with a good start, others quietly have to refer to the old saying: “Wait until February, that’s when the clock starts running.”

The battle for WC points, prize money and minutes and seconds on the TV screen has begun and will accompany us almost every weekend until the Finals in Falun at the end of March. More than 820,000 Norwegians watched the first relays in Beitostolen. Cross-country is more popular to watch than ever before and we are lucky to have places and organizers with snow this early in the season. For those of you who would like an extension of the season into the beautiful days in March and April, the answer is simple: at that time of the year, there is no place for us in the media window.

The observant TV viewer has hopefully been able to enjoy a couple of small but important visible improvements that resulted from good cooperation with the TV producers. In the sprints, the B finals have been replaced with more slow motion pictures of the athletes all the way through to the final and live close-ups of the athletes’ preparations up to the final minutes before the start. My guess is that we will see more “Usain Bolt shows” before the start as the athletes get used to this kind of exposure.

Before the interval starts the athletes are also better presented than before by signing a wall on a small podium just before they enter the start gate. Small details yes, but, “For the first time we are able to see the face of the athletes” is one of the most important feedbacks that I have heard so far. For the athletes it is an important new opportunity to present themselves and their sponsors in a better way.

More relays was one of the topics that came up in the discussions among athletes and journalists after the Beitostolen weekend. Yes, it is true that we have a lot of statistics that show that the fight between nations is popular. But, there are two reasons for this: The first being that over the last ten years we have only found place for two to three weekends with relays per season. Through the development of the sprints the wish grew stronger from the organizers and federations to have a sprint as one event in a weekend program. Secondly, we have seen that the tough competition program has led many of our biggest heroes to rest instead of racing. But I will definitely remind the members of the World Cup Committee of these comments when next year’s program is going to be discussed in Turkey in May.

I wish you all lots of snow, good skiing and good luck in the upcoming competitions.

Yours
Vegard Ulvang