| Men's 30 kilometre at the XI Olympic Winter Games | ||||||||||
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| Venue | Makomanai Cross Country Events Site | |||||||||
| Dates | 4 February | |||||||||
| Competitors | 59 from 18 nations | |||||||||
| Winning time | 1:36:31.15 | |||||||||
| Medalists | ||||||||||
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| Cross-country skiing at the 1972 Winter Olympics | ||
|---|---|---|
 | ||
| 5 km | women | |
| 10 km | women | |
| 15 km | men | |
| 30 km | men | |
| 50 km | men | |
| Relay | men | women |
The men's 30 kilometre cross-country skiing competition at the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan, was held on Friday 4 February at the Makomanai Cross Country Events Site. [1]
The sport of cross-country skiing encompasses a variety of formats for cross-country skiing races over courses of varying lengths according to rules sanctioned by the International Ski Federation and by various national organizations, such as the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) and Cross Country Ski Canada. International competitions include the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships, the FIS Cross-Country World Cup, and at the Winter Olympic Games. Such races occur over homologated, groomed courses designed to support classic (in-track) and freestyle events, where the skiers may employ skate skiing. It also encompasses cross-country ski marathon events, sanctioned by the Worldloppet Ski Federation, and cross-country ski orienteering events, sanctioned by the International Orienteering Federation. Related forms of competition are biathlon, where competitors race on cross-country skis and stop to shoot at targets with rifles, and paralympic cross-country skiing that allows athletes with disabilities to compete at cross-country skiing with adaptive equipment.
The 1972 Winter Olympics, officially known as the XI Olympic Winter Games, were a winter multi-sport event which was held from February 3 to February 13, 1972, in Sapporo, Hokkaidō, Japan. It was the first Winter Olympics to be held outside Europe and North America, and only the third game held outside those regions overall, after Melbourne and Tokyo.
Sapporo is the fifth largest city of Japan by population, and the largest city on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is the capital city of Hokkaido Prefecture and Ishikari Subprefecture. It is an ordinance-designated city.
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Each skier started at half a minute intervals, skiing the entire 30 kilometre course. Vyacheslav Vedenin of the Soviet Union was the 1970 World champion and Franco Nones of Italy was the defending Olympic champion from the 1968 Olympics in Grenoble, France. [2]
Vyacheslav Petrovich Vedenin is a retired Soviet cross-country skier. His silver medal over 50 km was the only medal won by a Soviet male skier at the 1968 Olympics, as his 4×10 km team placed fourth. At the next Olympics he was the Olympic flag bearer for the Soviet Union and won three medals, with golds in the 30 km and 4×10 km and a bronze in the 50 km. In the 4×10 km event Vedenin ran the last leg and won by 10 seconds, despite starting with a one-minute lag from Norway. His gold in the 30 km was the first individual win for a Soviet male skier at the Winter Olympics.
The FIS Nordic World Ski Championships 1970 took place 14–22 February 1970 in Vysoké Tatry, Czechoslovakia. This was the second time this city hosted the event having done so in 1935. It was the first time an event was televised in colour from Czechoslovakia though broadcasting there remained in black and white. This was the first championships that timed the results in hundredths of a second, a practice that continued until the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid when Sweden's Thomas Wassberg edged out Finland's Juha Mieto by 0.01 seconds in the men's 15 km event.
Francesco "Franco" Nones is an Italian former cross-country skier who competed during the 1960s.
