Birkebeinerrennet 2010
April 18, 2010
Birkebeinerrennet is a hard race. Most people doing it for the first time, think that 53 km can't be too bad compared to several other Worldloppet races that are longer. But you start at an elevation of 280m and climb to an elevation of 900m! At that point you have some exhilarating downhills and loose 250m and then you have to climb back up. This is followed by the only somewhat flat part for 7 km before you are again hurled down steep downhills into the Olympic Ski Stadium in Lillehammer. The waxing is rarely simple, in addition to the usual warming during the day you have the temperature change due to the different elevations.
This year was not an easy year. Birkebeinerrennet has a strange wave start arrangement. The first start was at 7 am when all men over 65 and all women over 60 started. (Norway like most Scandinavian countries don't practice equality between sexes). This is followed by the Elite that starts at 8 am. After that there are a large number of waves leaving with the last start being at 10:20 am. 
It was a great advantage to start early since it was rapidly getting warmer. If you had an early start, then you had icy and fast tracks for a good part of the race. However, in the late morning the tracks turned into mush and the glide was as terrible as was the grip. I assume that some skiers found a magic formula for waxing but it can't have been many. The official wax recommendations were not more useful than in previous years.
Over 15000 skiers were signed up for the race. The skiers starting later in the field were suffering from the warmer weather but there were no bad bottlenecks thanks to the very spread out start field. However, in spite of the many tracks they didn't hold up due to the warming snow. This is probably an unavoidable problem in a classic race with this many skiers unless the weather stays cold.
These are the results of all the IAWLS members that participated. It seems that we have more Swedes than Norwegians from IAWLS doing this race......
| Meg Bate | AUS | 3:03:52 |
| Saul Goldman | CAN | 5:04:31 |
| Peter Hoffman | CAN | 5:35:09 |
| Grant McLeod | CAN | 6:41:32 |
| Robert Palliser | CAN | 4:44:11 |
| Hannes Larsson | FRA | 5:24:14 |
| Berndt Bellman | GER | 7:07:26 |
| David Spencer | HUN | 4:31:18 |
| Corrado Ampezzan | ITA | 6:15:30 |
| Ineta Silina | LAT | 6:20:55 |
| Yonel Maniora | LUX | 5:01:06 |
| Romain Rinck | LUX | 7:03:21 |
| Leo Lansbergen | NED | 3:53:17 |
| Svein Harald Karlsen | NOR | 3:51:29 |
| Steinar Kvaale | NOR | 5:03:20 |
| Odd Arve Rakstad | NOR | 3:46:37 |
| Ola Svenneby | NOR | 3:56:00 |
| Sergey Ivanov | RUS | 3:00:43 |
| Tommy Berggren | SWE | 4:09:34 |
| Kristina Hammarfalk | SWE | 7:04:02 |
| Stefan Karlsson | SWE | 3:32:53 |
| Torbjörn Ledel | SWE | 7:06:29 |
| Lars Strinnholm | SWE | 7:04:02 |
| James Devol | USA | 6:06:11 |
| Daniel Josephson | USA | 5:04:21 |
| Bengt Karlsson | USA | 5:08:15 |
| Jay Wiener | USA | 6:05:42 |
This page was last revised on September 12, 2011