17.02 Fog Wreaks Havoc With Sochi Olympic Schedule

ROSA KHUTOR, Russia, February 17 (R-Sport) – The Sochi Winter Olympics were hit by their first major disruption Monday as thick fog forced the cancelation of two events and placed more in jeopardy.

The chief concern in the first days of competition was that the blinding sunshine and high temperatures could turn the slopes slushy, but as it turned out, the culprit is a low-lying quilt of fog shrouding the peaks.

So far, the casualties are the men’s snowboard cross and the men’s biathlon 15-kilometer mass start. The biathlon has been rescheduled for Tuesday, while the snowboard cross is now set to start with the first knockout races Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. local time.

“Well, I’m going back to bed,” French biathlete Martin Fourcade, who is chasing his third gold medal of the Games in the mass start, said on Twitter.

The women’s 12.5-kilometer biathlon mass start remains scheduled for Monday evening.

A Russian Biathlon Union statement on Twitter said it was likely to proceed as planned. “At the moment, weather conditions allow the women’s mass start to take place,” the organization said, but there was no immediate confirmation from the International Biathlon Union or Olympic organizers.

The men’s large hill team ski jumping is unlikely to be affected, Russian ski jump national team spokesperson Marina Kalinina told R-Sport.

“There’s good visibility now and no problems,” she said. “Three training rounds for Nordic combined athletes have just ended in good weather conditions.” The RusSki Gorki jumping center is located at significantly lower altitude than the ski and biathlon venues.

There is no word yet on the men’s freestyle ski aerials planned for Monday night, while the men’s bobsled competition is all but immune to fog disruption.

Russian state weather forecasters said earlier that the fog would clear by mid-afternoon, when “the visibility should already allow competitions to be held,” but conditions remained hazardous at the snowboard cross track.

“We were inspecting the course today in the morning, but I couldn’t see more than 10 meters ahead,” German snowboard cross medal contender Konstantin Schad said. “We were not allowed to test the course, so we were just sliding along it.”

Snowboard cross seeding runs were abandoned Monday, meaning that Tuesday’s action starts with 1/8 finals in which athletes will be seeded according to world ranking. Seeding runs are individual timed runs on the course, designed to stop the strongest athletes meeting early in the knockout stages.

Weather-related days are nothing new at the Winter Olympics. At the 2010 Games in Vancouver, several Alpine skiing events were postponed due to warm temperatures that softened the snow.

Updates headline and adds Russian Biathlon Union statement that women’s mass start likely to proceed