Söndag morgon den 17 juni gick IFK Lidingös herrar i mål som 4:a och bästa svenska lag i världens största stafett, Jukola, i Finland.

Helgen började mycket bra för Lidingö och damtruppen visade vilken fantastisk bredd man har när tredjelaget växlade som 3:a efter andra sträckan. Andralaget var bäst för dagen med 12:e plats och förstalaget plockade genom hela tävlingen till 20:e

Herrarnas förstalag visade toppklass genom att aldrig växla sämre än 7:a genom hela tävlingen och Emil Lauri avslutade mycket starkt med den klart snabbaste tiden på sista sträckan, hela 1.50 före Thierry Gueorgiou i segrarlaget Kalevan Rasti.

Vi noterar också ytterligare en sträckseger genom andralagets Petter Haraldsson som vann andra sträckan med 47 sekunders marginal.












Så här skriver Graham på sin blogg om Jukoladebuten för IFK Lidingö.
This was the race I had been looking forward to for a long time - excited to be in a really strong team, but also really nervous to be racing at the front end of such a big competition with such a lot of pressure and expectation. I ran first for IFK Lidingö, my first really big competition since joining. We watched the girls finish 12th and 19th, and so there was that little extra competitive pressure to do better than that.

So then about 11pm I lined up with 1300 other hopefuls, waiting to get into the forest. I had run first legs at World Cup relays, Nordic relays and domestically, but never in such a big field, and I had heard horror stories about mad dashes to the first control, and getting stuck behind seemingly thousands of people rushing about.

When the bell went, it seemed like within a second I was already being overtaken by everybody, and I concentrated on just running as hard as possible. I managed to take a few glances of the map, but nowhere near enough to see anything useful. When we all hit the track, I could relax, read the map and also pass a lot of runners. I picked a really good line, and navigated really well to my gaffle, and managed to punch first. Then there was a really long leg to the second control. I ran that pretty well, and in front of the huge pack and got there first again. Then suddenly there were hundreds of people on other gaffles around, and I made a small miss to the 3rd. After that I was never at the front, but I was running around people I knew to be fairly good, and I knew that I couldn't be too far behind the leaders. I ran fairly well through the next part of the course, but then I made small mistakes at 9(+30 secs) and 10 (+1min) (lots of people did). Both times I relocated quickly and found the control without any problem. Then at 14 I ran to the wrong gaffle (+1min). After that I had almost a perfect race, no real time loss, and managed to claw back about a minute to the leaders ( 1.53 behind at 19, 0.50 behind at finish).

So I finished 50 seconds behind the leaders in 5th place, and managed to just beat my old friend and rival Anders Tiltnes into 6th place ;). I was satisfied with the result, and in general with the performance, but I still made a few mistakes that I should not have made.

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