Badanina made an almost boring competition exciting again in the final shooting stage. Ahead by over a minute at one point, she missed two targets allowing her pursuers to come as close as 5 seconds at one point.

Flag Surprise

However, she crossed finish line in first place, waving the Russian flag, handed to her by her coach. She explained, “That was not planned; I was very surprised when I saw the coach with the flag. I thought it was at the hotel.”

However, there was a fight for Silver going on behind her. Andersson had one penalty during the final shooting stage. Thus, Hojnisz, who arrived at the range a little later but stayed clean, went with Andersson for the final loop.

Extra Power for Andersson

Hojnisz could even passed Andersson in the last loop, but that gave the Swede some extra power and she went back into second place. “I have no idea where I took this extra power from, “she happily commented.

Fourth place went to Anne-Tine Markset of Norway who had one penalty, while finishing 25.4 seconds back. Olga Galich, the winner of the Individual finished in fifth place with two penalties, 31.4 seconds back. Yuliya Bryhynets from Belarus, Iryna Kryuko and Maria Bukowska completed the top eight with one, four, and one penalties,  46.4 seconds, 1:12.2, and 2:08.1 back, respectively.

First Competition Held Last

The Youth Men’s 10K Pursuit should have been the first competition of the day but as the temperatures were below minus 20 Celsius only minutes before the start, it was moved to the end of the day’s program. This postponement was a problem for Pechenkin because waiting made him nervous, he explained. However, you could not see that while he was on the tracks. He finished with only one penalty in 27:34.40, well ahead of his competitors.

 German Johannes Kühn, who won yesterday’s Sprint, followed in second place. Unlike Pechenkin, he was happy about the postponement because he has a cold and was able to stay out of the bitterly cold morning air. Despite four tours of the penalty loop and a ballet-like spin during one, he finished just 18.7 seconds behind Pechenkin.

Penalty Loop Spin

His spin happened after the second prone shooting when he wanted to enter the already busy penalty loop. He explained, “I thought the guy had another lap but he wanted to go out on the tracks and so we had a little interference. There was some pole in my way so pushed my ski pole into the ground and spun around.”

Places three and four went to Ivan Pichuzhkin and Alexandr Loginov, two Russians, which made the Russian team by far, the most successful today. Fifth was Vetle Sjastad Christiansen from Norway with seven penalties, 2:13.3 back. Florent Claude from France finished sixth with three penalties, 2:42.7 back, but ahead of Belarusian Aliaksandr Darozhk. Benjamin Plaickner of Italy closed out the top eight with three penalties, 3:20.4 back.