The 41st Finlandia Ski Marathon will be organized on the coming
weekend as planned. The courses however need to be shortened due to the
difficult snow situation. Both the classic and free style courses need
to be shortened - from 50 km to 32km and from 32km to 20km.
The trails will follow the original route.
The
shortened courses won’t affect the competition schedule apart from the
20km course, where the start time has been moved on both days to 10:40
am.
In order to enable skiing even on the shortened routes a lot of artificial snow needs to be used.
Due
to the lack of snow passing will be forbidden on some areas along the
routes and the organizers cannot guarantee that the classic trail is in
good condition the whole way. If possible, we encourage the skiers to
leave their best pair of skis at home because the trails will at some
places be short of snow.
The Finlandia Ski Marathon is a member
of Worldloppet and the shortened routes do not affect stamping of the
Worldloppet passports.
Contributed by: Finlandia Hiihto