Where have they gone? Suddenly the Ukrainian cross-country skiing team is considered missing. The fourth stage of the Tour de Ski in cross-country skiing is supposed to start in Toblach in Italy, the best in the world are supposed to compete – but the Ukrainian team is missing. No one locally has any information about the whereabouts of Viktoriya Olekh, Anastasiia Nikon, Sofiia Shkatula, Andriy Dotsenko and Denys Muhotinov. Why aren’t they at the start?
If the Estonian team or the delegation from the Czech Republic had been missing, the excitement in Italy would probably have been manageable. But when people from Ukraine disappeared in times of war like these…?
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Even Michael Lamplot, the race director of the International Ski Federation (Fis), seemed to be in a losing position. “I have no idea where they went, they just never showed up at the start,” Lamplot told the Swedish newspaper expresses. And his colleague, Fis press spokeswoman Synne Dyrhaug, also seemed perplexed. “I don’t know what happened.”
It took a while before the World Ski Association solved the New Year’s puzzle. In response to SZ’s request, the Fis announced on Friday afternoon that the Ukrainian delegation had now contacted us and explained “that their original intention was that the athletes would leave the Tour de Ski at this point in the competition.” The reason, according to the Fis, was that “financial difficulties” had forced the early departure of the five Ukrainian athletes. The Ukrainian team simply hadn’t told anyone.
The Ukrainian association itself had not commented on the disappearance until Friday afternoon. After the third stage in Toblach, at an altitude of over 1200 meters, Viktoriya Olekh was told that she was having “big problems at altitude”. In the Tour de Ski, where, as in cycling tours, the stage results are added together to form an overall ranking, the three Ukrainian women were already 17 minutes behind at the time of their exit, and their male colleagues had also long been behind.
In the men’s category, after four of seven Tour de Ski stages, the Norwegian Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo is leading, the women’s competition is also in Norwegian hands, Astrid Öyre Slind is first, the German Victoria Carl is in seventh place. And so the new and old cross-country skiing puzzle is now: How do you conquer Norway?
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