Long Qualification: emphatic victory for Simone Niggli
Posted on | May 15, 2012 | Category: News
Defending European Champion at Long Distance, Simone Niggli, set out her stall in perfect fashion today with a win by as much as 2:42 over one of yesterday’s qualification winners, Minna Kauppi. The male defending champion, Daniel Hubmann, wasn’t on the start list today, but his country Switzerland is the only one to have 12 runners in the finals.
The winners of the other two women’s heats were Tatiana Ryabkina, Russia, who was 41 seconds faster than home athlete Lena Eliasson, and Merja Rantanen, Finland, 26 seconds ahead of Norway’s Tone Wigemyr. Swiss runner Rahel Friederich in this heat was the most unlucky participant of the day, failing by just 1 second to make the qualifying 17th place.
Russia and Finland both had two heat winners today; Russia’s Dmitry Tsvetkov won men’s heat 1 by 59 seconds over Swiss runner Matthias Müller, whilst Olli-Markus Taivainen for Finland was 15 seconds faster than Thierry Gueorgiou, France. Home athlete Johan Runesson, a heat winner yesterday, came in with another impressive performance today in this heat, finishing third, 17 seconds slower than the winner. Anders Nordberg, Norway had an impressive win by 1:07 over Anders Holmberg, Sweden in the other heat.
Nineteen nations have one or more athletes in the Long Distance final on Friday – 17 nations will be represented in the men’s final and 15 in the women’s. After Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Finland have the next highest total of runners with 11, Norway and Sweden both have 10 and Russia has 9. Germany and Hungary have qualifiers for a final for the first time today, whereas Bulgaria had a qualifier yesterday but not today.
Today’s event was affected by a traffic accident which closed one of the main routes leading to the race site, resulting in a worrying delay for some runners. But it was not found necessary to delay the starts, and in the end everyone was able to start on time.
Full results along with course maps and a mass of other detail can be found on the very informative event website www.eoc2012.se. During the races, this site carries a live results service together with live video, GPS tracking and a blog.
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