Splits analysis diagram for the World Cup race in La Clusaz is now up. It is interesting to see how Petter Northug is quite far behind all the way until the last split where he fights his way up to the lead. It wasn’t enough though – Vylegzhanin was beat the “unbeatable” Northug in the final sprint, even if Northug had saved his power all the way up there.

In the above Splitsbrowser-screenshot a flat line on a split means that an athlete is the fastest on a split. The steeper the line goes, the more an athlete looses on that split. The vertical difference between two lines illustrates the actual difference between the athletes at that point in the race. The scale to the left is in minutes.

• Interactive splits browser for Women’s 15 km skating
• Interactive splits browser for Men’s 30 km skating (Note that some athletes are missing due to some missing split data in the live data today)
• See also results of the XC predictions from La Clusaz – now with several new features showing how the athletes performed compared to predictions. The best predictions today were made by Joonas Salminen – he got Bjørgen right on top – whereas Vylegzhanin was in on his Top 5 list.

The two splits analysis diagrams below shows how Bjørgen, Kowalczyk and Steira race away early. Kowalczyk takes a few seconds at each of the sprints for World Cup points, but except for that nothing is happening between the three until at the very end were Bjørgen and Kowalczyk race away from Steira.

See below for the development further down in the field.