Back with a bang: Johaug (NOR) roars to first victory since 2022 in Lillehammer 10km
Dec 06, 2024·Cross-Country
Therese Johaug rolled back the years to win the Women’s 10km Freestyle in Lillehammer, Norway on Friday – exactly 1000 days since her last World Cup win.
The cross-country legend, who returned to competitive racing this season with the main aim of competing at the world championships on home snow in Trondheim in February-March, claimed her 83rd stage win and 10th in Lillehammer.
After blasting out of the starting gate as the 46th of 70 competitors, the 36-year-old already had a 7.1-second lead over fellow Norwegian veteran Heidi Weng at the 3.5km checkpoint. Johaug eventually finished 11.4 seconds ahead of her compatriot, blowing the rest of the field out of the water with a with a time of 25 minutes, 16.4 seconds.
Another 36-year-old Astrid Oeyre Slind (NOR) was 43.2 seconds behind Johaug in third to complete Norway’s first sweep of a women’s World Cup podium since January 2023 and first in a distance race since January 2021 when Johaug was also the winner and Weng came third.
Race director Axel Teichmann said beforehand that “the strongest endurance athletes” were most likely to prevail and so it proved. In much softer conditions than competitors faced in Ruka a week ago, with fresh snowfall making an already-difficult 5km course even more challenging, Johaug was in a class of her own.
Despite breathing heavily and rhythmically in time with her freestyle strokes, Johaug made light work of the many climbs and tricky sharp turns coming out of the downhill sections.
Going out after the Norwegian, heavyweight Swedes Ebba Andersson and Frida Karlsson – winner of the 10km Classic in Ruka last weekend – and last season’s Crystal Globe champion Jessie Diggins (USA) couldn’t make that apparent advantage tell, falling further and further behind.
As it transpired, Johaug raced in Lillehammer on Friday with more than just a point to prove to herself.
“In the press conference yesterday, a media guy in Sweden told me that I was a loser,” she explained. “But today I kicked back and I showed them and… oh my god, that was so good.”
While Weng was always clear in second, Slind made up ground on both Karlsson and Diggins on the second lap to claim just her fourth World Cup podium but second in as many weeks after she finished behind Karlsson and Johaug in Ruka.
“I’m actually really happy about this,” Slind said. “I didn’t expect to race this fast in these conditions so I’m better than I thought! It has been a really good start to the season and I just have to keep the flow going until [the world championships] in Trondheim. My goal there is to win a gold. The 50k would be awesome.”
The FIS Cross-Country World Cup season continues on Saturday in Lillehammer with the Men’s and Women’s Sprint Freestyle races.
To watch all the action, click here
For the full results from Lillehammer, click here
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