Ruka Tour kicks off World Cup season 2019/20

The Viessmann FIS Nordic Combined World Cup starts its 2019/20 season with a mini tour. The Nordic Opening in Ruka (FIN) will host the event for the second time after the maiden edition took place here in 2017. Last season, Lillehammer (NOR) played host to the three-day tour.

The tour programme this year contains three Individual Gundersen competitions on Friday, Saturday and Sunday with the cross-country distances of 5 km, 10 km and 10 km. On the first day, all athletes are allowed to start, two qualifications on Saturday and Sunday will reduce the respective start fields to 50 for the second and third competition. For each event, the normal amount of World Cup points is awarded and the athlete with the most World Cup points after these three events wins the tour.

On all three days, only the podium athletes of the day will receive prize money. The rest of the prize money goes into an overall pot, which will be divided among the Top 20 athletes of the overall tour standings. The tour winner receives 15,000 CHF.

All rules and the concrete distribution of the prize money can be found here (Article 4.4.4)

The initial Ruka Tour was won by Akito Watabe in 2017 under dramatic circumstances: The Japanese had (unknowingly) fractured a rib in a cross-country training accident two days earlier but was off to a flying start with a third place and a victory in the first two events. In the final cross-country race, however, he struggled and thought all was lost when he only finished eleventh. As runner-up, Espen Andersen from Norway was only able to deliver a seventh place himself, Watabe won the Ruka Tour by eight points in the end.

The programme of the Tour changed in Lillehammer last year to include the first Mass Start in World Cup level in ten years but all three competition of the tour only had one winner: Jarl Magnus Riiber. The Norwegian dominator of the last winter did not care if the challenge was to do a Nordic Combined event forward or backwards, he just kept on winning.

How the 2019 edition of the season opening tour will end up is anyone’s guess, but of course Riiber will be the hunted man for the weekend. His challengers: the ever constant Akito Watabe, Austrian Summer Grand Prix winner Franz-Josef Rehrl, local hero Ilkka Herola, German legends Eric Frenzel, Johannes Rydzek and Fabian Rießle and more candidates come to mind. With a good portion of luck needed in Ruka’s often windy conditions, the possible winner’s list is long.

The programme

Thursday, 28.11.
12:30 Official training cross-country
15:00 Official training SJ HS 142
17:00 Provisional Competition Round

Friday, 29.11.
10:45 Trial Round
12:00 INDIVIDUAL GUNDERSEN competition round HS 142
16:00 INDIVIDUAL GUNDERSEN 5 km cross-country race

Saturday, 30.11.
08:45 Trial Round/Qualification HS 142
09:30 INDIVIDUAL GUNDERSEN competition round HS 142
15:00 INDIVIDUAL GUNDERSEN 10 km cross-country race

Sunday, 01.12.
09:10 Trial Round/Qualification HS 142
10:10 INDIVIDUAL GUNDERSEN competition round HS 142
15:00 INDIVIDUAL GUNDERSEN 10 km cross-country race

All times are local times (CET + 1 h)

The programme may be subject to change!