Cross-country skiers and especially ski guardians find themselves in a restless atmosphere at the World Cup in Trondheim, which serves as the preliminaries of the World Cup.
The skiers want to get to know the tracks of the 2025 World Cup, but the equipment problems resulting from the ban on fluoride creams threaten to disrupt their concentration.
The rule change hasn’t really affected the competitions of traditional skiing, but there has been a surprising dispersion in the results of freestyle skiing.
The weekend in Trondheim threatens to become the most surprising of the early season, if the weather forecast is correct and the fourth weekend of the tour is contested in wet weather.
– No one has ever been able to test new creams in water. There hasn’t been such weather here, where the early season has been run, head coach Teemu Pasanen tells.
In the most exciting case, the maintenance personnel will use new creams to get a first feel for the water on the night before Friday’s sprint.
– It will be interesting if the weather warms up at night before the race. It will be a tough day for maintenance if you have to start testing as soon as you can, i.e. in the middle of the night, Pasanen continues.
A new jar is coming
The US maintenance team has surprisingly been the most reliable in the early season. The Finns have had difficulties in the harshest freestyle skiing competitions, but the maintenance teams of Norway and Sweden have also had problems.
The situation has been going on from one weekend to the next, as the cream manufacturing companies have introduced new products to the market during the season. Not all cream companies even had fluorine-free ski creams available according to the new rules at the opening of the World Cup in Ruka.
– All anti-slip creams are new and some companies are only now introducing them to the market. Every weekend there have been new creams when they have been prepared, Pasanen explains the challenges of ski maintenance.
– That is, no one has been able to test them in advance at all.
Guardians are now familiarizing themselves with the properties of creams. With these prospects, the studies will continue throughout the season.
– The situation is the same for everyone when it comes to finding out which creams work in which weather, confirms Pasanen.
– Here you can be prepared for the fact that this season there will be quite interesting results at times. Freestyle skiing competitions are much more difficult to predict than before.
The small ski project continues
The skiers would like to leave their lubrication worries at the service booth and focus on the routes of the next World Championships. Norway’s Trondheim is a strange place for most skiers, because in recent years the World Cup tour has not stopped there until February 2020.
– Everyone now wants to get a little feel for the tracks of next winter’s World Championships, Pasanen knows.
– The profiles have been studied and modeled on the ski carpet, but you only get the best feel for them when you can ski them in a competition. Skiers get an overview of how the tracks go, how to approach the stadium, what the uphill sections are like, and so on.
In the preliminaries in Trondheim, the Olympic Training Center OVK’s small ski project will also continue, i.e. the development of skiing, biathlon and combined equipment maintenance. Olli Ohtonen, Teemu Lemmettyä and Juho Halonen among other things, during the weekend they model the tracks of the World Cup with GPS.
– They are involved in a few world cups in support of ski maintenance and do certain tests. They are always involved in value competitions, so that way we have gained an additional resource for maintenance, Pasanen continues.
– This is also related to the sanding pattern project, for which Hannu Hovila is responsible.
The conditions in the Nordic countries are known
Ski tests will not be conducted to the same extent as before the Beijing 2022 and Pyeongchang 2018 Olympics. Lubricant tests are not very useful when thinking about the World Cup, when the skating creams are in the final product development phase, and the preliminaries are not organized at the time of the World Cup, i.e. during the spring season.
– At least no major testing has been planned for spring either, Pasanen says.
– There is not the same need for comprehensive testing now as before the previous Olympics, because the weather and snow conditions of the Nordic countries are quite familiar to us.
The World Cup in Trondheim will take place between February and March 2025.
will follow the events of the World Cup in Trondheim in the app and Urheilu’s website throughout the weekend. The best bits are also on Urheilustudio’s broadcasts.