Coletta Rydzek had a dream start to the Tour de Ski for cross-country skiers. She took second place in the freestyle sprint in Toblach. On the home straight, she only had to admit defeat to the Norwegian Kristine Skistad and secured the German team’s best result in the Olympic winter: The 28-year-old from Oberstdorf was the only DSV runner to survive the semi-finals in addition to the quarter-finals. Only 0.24 seconds were missing from the second victory of her career. Rydzek had had a problematic night at the start: for health reasons she only got four hours of sleep. Nevertheless, she always remained on an equal footing with the top people in the fight for the day’s victory. “I didn’t let it bother me,” said Rydzek, the sister of combiner Johannes Rydzek. It was a crazy day. “I knew that the route suited me very well. After the night I didn’t know what was going on. I was super nervous,” she said.
Under bright blue skies, Sofie Krehl (Oberstdorf) and Pia Fink (Bremelau) also made it to the quarter-finals of the best 30, where it was over for both of them. Olympic team sprint champion Katharina Hennig Dotzler missed out on a place in the quarter-finals by finishing 46th in the prologue.
In the men’s category, Johannes Hösflot Kläbo from Norway took his 102nd World Cup victory. The 15-time world champion won ahead of his teammates Lars Heggen and Oskar Opstad Vike. From a German perspective, only Jan Stölben (Ernstberg) survived the prologue and recorded his best result of the season in 22nd place.
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