40th place at Jämsä-Jukola
After our 31st place at 10MILA, the OK Ravinen team was hoping to improve last years disastrous Jukola result (a 73rd place) with quite much. My goal before the competition was to switch the digits and make a 37th place, wich is by far the best from OK Ravinen in a few years.
We had a quite strong team, but unfortunatly Yannick, who was going to run first leg, injured himself on the Stockholm City Cup final the wednesday before Jukola, so he couldn’t run. That was of course a bit weakening for the team, but not too bad since we had decent reserves to move from our 2nd team.
The relay was off to a flying start for Ravinen, when Jonny Crickmore had a good run and brought the team into finish in the first group. And on 2nd leg Assar made a really good run, changing over as 21st to Emil Granqvist. Unfortunatly, it is a little tough for a 18 year old to follow the front pack, and he lost both some time and some places, finishing 47. My brother and Rich Robinson (the reserve that was moved to team 1) had decent runs on 4th and 5th leg, holding the place, and then Perra Olsson on 6th lost quite a lot of time, but not that many places, and he changed me out on last leg as number 50, with a few good runners just in front, and just behind.
I tried to push really hard from my first step, and with Vincent Coupat in Halden 2 following me, we set up a good pace, picking up Ulf Forseth in Frol, and a little later, OMa Taivanen in Pellon Ponsi. Our group had a good pace, and I tried to pusch haard to get away from them, which I didn’t succeed with until I saw Khramov in Hiisirasit and Jesper Lysell in Rhens just in front of me, and I managed to pull away from my group and catch the group ahead of me. On the long leg north me and Khramov pulled away from Rhens, and when we went into the flat and easy area of the forest closest to the finish I had a really good pace and a really good time, less than 1 minute behind the fastest guy Matthias Merz. From here and in, though, my race was quite bad. I lost som time on one control, and got really tired, so my pace went down significantly. In the end I finished in 40th place, but Hiisirasti with Khramov finished 37th. That was the place we should have gotten! So I am a little bit disappointed with the end of my race. 15 minutes before the end I was 2nd on the leg, 1 minute behind Merz, in the finish I was 12th, almost 4 minutes behind! What happened here?!
To sum up, 40th was a good result for us. To next year we aim to be top 30, wich feels like a realistic goal for us. It feels really inspiring to have a team that is getting better and better each year. There is not much time until we are aspiring for top 10 in the big relays!