Letter to Vasaloppet

November 30, 2009

Dear Tommy,

Thanks for your answer of June 30, 2009, to our open letter of June 9, 2009. Your answer can be summarized in two claims: 1) The majority of Vasaloppet skiers do not want the start to be changed, 2) VL cannot change the start for technical reasons. Let us discuss these two points.

1) Opinion of Worldloppet skiers
Following your answer, we considered that it was timely to conduct an opinion poll about Vasaloppet’s start. The outcome was an overwhelming majority of 84.5% stating that they were unhappy with the existing start system and wanted it to be changed into a wave start or the “Ideal start”. Full details of the poll are found on www.worldloppetskier.com/.. together with a collection of typical comments from skiers.

2) Making the change
You discussed the problems connected with a wave start and said that it would be necessary to have a total duration of 2 hours for the start procedure. Your mathematics is wrong. We mentioned the 2004 Öppet Spår on Sunday; taking your number of 8000 skiers and observing that the flow of skiers took 45 minutes and no bottlenecks occurred, the extrapolation to Vasaloppet’s 15000 starters gives 90 minutes as a sufficient duration. You can certainly prolong the closing time in Mora by half an hour to 20:30. The elite can start at 7:30 instead of 8:00. A good motivation for this is tradition that Vasaloppet often refers to: the first Vasaloppet in 1922 started at 7:00! And finally, since the last starters do not lose any longer 45 minutes in the bottleneck, there you have more than the needed 90 minutes. With appropriate measures you can even prolong the starts to 2 hours.
You wrote that changing the start would negatively affect the logistics with buses, health care, etc. The transports logistics would be different but rather easier than now. With the 90 minutes duration also the lineups at the toilets would create less problems. Concerning health, a major defect of to-day’s start system is the necessity to sprint the first km. No medical expert has contested our claim that such a sprint, when you are not perfectly warmed up, is bad for health. Certainly, the presence of medical teams will be required for a longer total duration. So what? And we believe that the cost of extending the length of the electrically lit track is only a small fraction of the budget of 1 million Euros that Vasaloppet devotes to media and public relations each year.

Conclusions

We will not repeat here all the arguments that we presented in our open letter. Vasaloppet’s start system is unsportsmanlike and in breach of the FIS rules and Worldloppet’s high quality requirements. A further advantage of the Ideal start, besides removing the bottleneck, is that the last 86 km are much less crowded. On the top of the hill the time difference between the first and the last skier will increase by 45 minutes (90-45). An overwhelming majority of skiers require a change. It is a question of attitude: Vasaloppet should first recognize that there is a big problem and that consequently there is an absolute necessity to change the start. Then the solutions are found by such a competent organization as Vasaloppet. Final word:
                                                        Yes, you can!

Respectfully,

Hannes Larsson, president of IAWLS

This page was last revised on March 10, 2010