Much indicates that the preliminary competition calendar for the next long season will need to be adjusted. While there is still a long way to go for the intended World Cup premiere in Finnish Ruka at the end of November, the corona virus makes most of it uncertain.

More and more people seem to agree that it will at least become a tight-knit World Cup program, and it is difficult at all to know if they will be able to travel freely between different countries this winter.

- But if you ignore that, the biggest risk for next year is that many organizers do not actually have the advice or opportunity to organize competitions because it is difficult to get sponsors and so on. The biggest challenge for next year is probably to get a competition program together at all, ”says Niklas Jonsson, Sweden's representative on Fis's length committee.

Ongoing discussion

Many nations outside the Nordic countries have already had a difficult time getting their World Cup events together. The corona crisis and its economic repercussions do not make things any easier.

In the short term, this could mean removing some world cup weekends, or moving them to countries that have the opportunity to host more competitions. Therefore, there may be more competitions than usual in Sweden, Norway and Finland.

- In the short term, it can be so. One way out is to have reservoirs for the competitions that cannot be held, and then it may not be so easy for those countries that cannot arrange to find another organizer in that country. Then it is about which countries can take on the arrangements. Then there is a risk that there will be more concentration to Nordic countries, says Niklas Jonsson.

Important environmental efforts

But spilling out the World Cup does not have to stop at a temporary crisis solution. The discussion about losing the program has been going on for a long time and now there is an opportunity to take action, says Jonsson, who belonged to the cross country team throughout the 90s.

- When I started riding in the 1989 World Cup I think there were nine competitions. Last year it was about 40 or something.

- If you have fewer races it might mean that more riders run a larger proportion of all world cup competitions. For the past few years, it has been seen that not everyone is investing in the overall World Cup, in order to be able to perform really well on some individual weekends or championships.

He sees fewer world cup weekends in front of him, but with more races per race venue. This would also reduce the number of trips, which would be a positive and important climate effect.

And unlike the uncertain coming season - when there may be unusually many competitions in the Nordic countries - in the long run, the Nordic countries have to give up a number of competitions, he says. Otherwise, you risk completely marginalizing smaller nations, and the longitudinal sport will then be an overly Nordic settlement.