Julian Dent was our best performing runner in yesterday’s Middle distance World Cup event, being only 8 minutes behind the winner, Swiss Matthias Kyburz, who ran above his world ranking of 21.   Swiss superstar Simone NIGGLI-LUDER continued her successful 2012 comeback, after giving birth to twins, to make it a double Swiss victory.  With three men in the top 4 and five women in the top 10 places the Swiss are certainly eyeing off medals in their “home” World Championships in three weeks.

The terrain consisted of steep slopes with deep but crossable valleys.  Mostly highly runnable with no undergrowth. Courses were 6.3 (women) and 7.0 km (men) with 220 / 290 meters of ascent. Planned winning times were 37 minutes for both men and women.  View maps and tracking of top runners on website.

Sprint, Sunday.
First start women 8.30pm  AUS – men 9.35. The terrain is a flat city centre, mostly urban old town centre including a  UNESCO world heritage monastery.  Courses are 2.4 / 2.9 km long with 75 / 100 meters of ascent – winning times of 14 / 14:30. See the old map with a thought course made by Eva Jurenikova here (via Twitter).    There is GPS tracking and live TV coverage.  Seehttp://www.postfinancesprint.ch/    Only the top 40 ranked runners are in the official sprint, so our runners will be competing in the earlier public race.

1 Matthias Kyburz            SUI         40:41 0:00

2 Olav Lundanes               NOR       40:45 +0:04

3 Baptiste Rollier              SUI         41:34 +0:53

4 Matthias Merz               SUI         41:53 +1:12

5 Frederic Tranchand      FRA        42:12 +1:31

6 Jan Sedivy                        CZE         42:15 +1:34

71 Julian Dent                   AUS       49:08 +8:27

77 Ross Morrison             NZL        50:48 +10:07

84 James Bradshaw         NZL        54:46 +14:05

85 Tane Cambridge         NZL        55:24 +14:43

86 Evan Barr                       AUS       55:32 +14:51

87 Murray Scown             AUS       59:06 +18:25