The German men’s relay has clearly missed the medal ranks at the Olympic cross-country skiing competitions. Like the women’s team on Saturday, Andreas Katz, Thomas Bing, Lucas Bögl and Jonas Dobler didn’t get past sixth place in Pyeongchang after a weak start.
“The placement is fine. In the end it was a good result,”said Andreas Schlütter, the German head of cross-country skiing at ZDF:” There are four people in the relay, the boys win and lose together.
As with the women, gold went to Norway for the youngster Johannes Hösflot Kläbo. The youngest cross-country Olympic champion in history since his victory in the sprint has secured his second triumph in South Korea. Norway triumphed for the first time since 2002 again in the king’s discipline and took revenge for the debacle of Sochi in 2014 (place four).
With a 9.4-second gap, the athletes from Russia took silver, bronze went to France (+36.9). Sweden, the 2010 and 2014 Olympic champions, only finished fifth. The German team was 2:08 minutes behind, but it was better than the debacle of Sochi – four years ago it was only ninth place. At the 2017 World Cup Germany was also in sixth place, but had been fighting for the medals for a long time.
Just like Stefanie Böhler the day before, men’s star runner Andreas Katz quickly lost the match. The Black Forest came 1:14 minutes behind the front of the lead to the first switch, so the race was running from a German point of view “I didn’t make it up the mountain. It’s humble when you put a squadron like that into the race. I blew it,”said the devastated cat.
While the Russians, despite the exclusion of their best athletes as a result of the state doping scandal, ran far ahead and the Norwegians, who were in a surprisingly distant past, went on pursuit, Bing lost time as the second German runner,”I tried to run my own race and keep in touch with them,”said Bing, who had convinced me with eleventh place in the skiathlon.
After switching to skating, the pursuers around Norway’s skiathlon Olympic champion Simen Hegstad Krüger placed the Russians. On the final section, Kläbo – sometimes provocatively casual and with stand-up attempts – made everything clear. The courageous Bögl and Dobler provided German damage control.