NORTHERN EXPOSURE
The Arctic Race of Norway exposes some of the remotest and most beautiful land in Europe to an international audience. Procycling travelled north and found that the race is also perfect for showcasing the racing stars of tomorrow
There’s only one road in to the Norwegian village of Kjøllefjord. The small fishing community is one of the most northerly in Norway and, at last count, is home to fewer than 1,000 people. During the harsh winter, the residents live in almost total darkness for a few weeks. The extreme Arctic cold sets in and temperatures drop to an average of -10°C. To get here, you drive all 22km of the Fv894 county road, which threads between rolling barren granite hills dotted with lakes. Reindeer grazing on the grass beside the road are unsettled by the minimal traffic, and apart from them and the occasional eagle flying overhead, there are scarce signs of life before the tarmac comes to an end. Kjøllefjord is literally the end of the road.
Nestled deep in the Arctic Circle on the Nordkinnhalvøya peninsula, the village is one of the most isolated in Norway. Kjøllefjord is part of Finnmark, Norway’s largest county which stretches all the way to the Russian border. If the snowfall is too heavy during winter and the road gets blocked, Kjøllefjord’s hardy residents rely on boats that dock in the harbour twice a day to take them where they need to go. There is an airport, around 30km north, at Mehamn. But you have to drive 70km south along the Fv888, passing a few traditional red and white Norwegian wooden houses sat alone on the way, to get to the next village, Lebesby. And even then, that’s still a small neighbouring community to have – in 2015 Lebesby’s population was reported as just 85.
“I’m a teacher in a local school,” says Toorn, to Procycling. He’s been a Kjøllefjord resident for 25 years and works in the only school in the village. “For me it’s great living here. It’s the wilderness, you have hunting, live by the land, you have fishing, we are just talking now about picking cloudberries… We do skiing, have snow mobiles.”
In 1990, the Norwegian government was so concerned by the migration of residents to the country’s more populous south, they introduced the ‘Finnmark Allowance’, a series of tax breaks to encourage more Norwegians to stay north. The policy includes exemption from national insurance contributions, a write-down of student loans and a reduction in personal tax. An increase in family allowance, known as the ‘Finnmark supplement’, was also introduced to help stem the tide. “I was just finished with teaching school, and if you come up north you have some benefits,” Toorn says, explaining why he moved to Kjøllefjord. “I was going to be here two years, but 25 years later… a wife, four children. My youngest is nine years old, she goes to the school, too.”
Kjøllefjord being so remote means no major sporting events have ever been held here – “Nothing in my 25 years”, Toorn says with a laugh. So when stage 2 of the Arctic Race of Norway finishes in Kjøllefjord, all 1,000 residents seem to have come out to watch. Walking down Strandvegen, the main road through the village, which is home to the police station, the town hall and a fishing bait shop, is almost like entering the twilight zone. As the stage reaches its climax, residents are spread for a kilometre down the road to the finish. The only inhabitant that seems not to be on the roadside is a lonesome dog, whose nose is pressed up against a window watching the commotion.
“It was just crosswind action, echelons. That’s the irst proper race I’ve done where it was just carnage all day. It was just crazy” Connor Swift
“It’s the best place you can live, it’s calm, you have everything you need here – the nature, the food from the nature,” says Ellinor, a reindeer herder whose family have owned a farm here for generations. She is eagerly waiting by the finish line and watching the racing on the big screen. “We have reindeer in this place so we move with the reindeer from the inland to the coast every year. Soon you will see our reindeer in this race [on the television].” This remoteness is the Arctic Race of Norway’s USP. It is repeatedly touted as the ‘most beautiful race in the world’ thanks to the breathtaking wild and untamed scenery that mixes barren hills with dramatic coastal fjords, lush forests and the midnight sun during August. The race reaches some of the most secluded places in Europe.
“The race is special because we are going to small places, we are trying to include everyone,” the managing director of the Arctic Race of Norway, Knut-Eirik Dybdal, tells Procycling. “Maybe the only sport that can include everyone is cycling, because you don’t need to build the big arenas to host events and you don’t need to have the cost of running it afterwards. This is an event that really fits in the northern part of Norway.
“Also, the ownership of this race is with the people. The people have been working very hard to have this race and to have this happen, and you can see on the road… the craziness.” Despite retiring four years ago, Thor Hushovd is still one of the biggest stars in Norway. His World Championships victory in 2010, plus Tour de France stage and green jersey wins, fuelled a boom in cycling in the country, which it is still thriving on today. Hushovd won the first Arctic Race in 2013 and has been an ambassador for the event since the start. But he needed persuading when Dybdal first called him in 2011 with the idea.
“One day I got a phone call from this crazy northern Norwegian guy, Knut… he was talking about bringing the best teams, the best riders in the world, to northern Norway to race, and I was like, okay, how can I hang up on this guy as quickly as possible?” he recalls. “I thought it was a crazy idea. Nobody wants to go that far away, it makes everything complicated.
“When I was talking to him, the courage he had, the motivation, the ideas...I said, you know what?
I will support this, I will support you, because I believe in this.”
The race is now in its sixth year and if anything, organisers ASO have pushed the 2018 edition more into the unknown. The race travelled further east and further north than ever before. Stage 1 ended in Kirkenes, a town on Norway’s border with Russia. Finland is not far away either. Seventy years ago, Kirkenes found itself on the front line in World War II. Towards the end of the war, and following the German occupation of Norway, Kirkenes was one of the first places to be invaded by the liberating Russian army. It became one of the most heavily bombed towns in Europe and was destroyed in its entirety.
Today, efforts are made to strengthen and maintain the peace between the neighbours and Kirkenes is being turned into an international community that thrives on cross-border business. Many residents originate from the neighbouring countries, or regularly go to Russia or Finland to work. The town’s mayor, Rune Rafaelsen, describes the town as a “melting pot”. Race organisers made an unsuccessful effort to include a Russian border crossing as part of the stage 1 route, but the idea remains firmly part of the race’s future plans.
While the Arctic Race of Norway exposes a wild, little-known landscape to racing fans around the world, the racing itself gave a platform to a crop of young, fledgling cyclists. The overall race victory may have fairly predictably fallen to a rider from one of the four WorldTour teams – Sergei Chernetskii of Astana – but it was the 15 ProContinental and Continental teams who largely animated the racing. Arguably, the team who left Norway happiest and with their reputation most enhanced was Belgian Continental team Corendon-Circus. It is primarily a cyclo-cross squad and they only started their road racing season in May, yet it emphatically won three of the four stages. Mathieu van der Poel took the first and fourth stages and his team-mate Adam Toupalik won stage 3 (with Van der Poel behind in a close second).
On paper, the Arctic
Race’s parcours didn’t look too tricky. The rolling routes were speckled with cat 1 and 2 climbs that didn’t rise higher than a few hundred metres. But set against the unforgiving northern Norwegian landscape and changeable weather, it was a testing four days for the peloton. Switch off or lose concentration, and riders were cut loose and spat out the back in an instant.
The tone was set on stage 1, a 184km slog south from Vadsø to Kirkenes. It took more than an hour before the day’s breakaway formed. Ending with two laps of a technical 6.5km town circuit and a 500m climb to the finish line, the day’s pre-race favourite may have been Van der Poel, but few could have foreseen how convincingly he would distance his rivals on the eight per cent gradient at the finish. Fresh off the back of a silver medal in the European Championships road race the weekend before, and wearing the blue, red and white stripes of the Dutch National champion, the 23-year-old won the stage with metres of clear road behind him. He only faltered when he took his hands off the bars and swerved while celebrating. If the comparisons to Peter Sagan were there before for the highly-rated young Dutchman whose grandfather happens to be Raymond Poulidor, they will only now increase.
Twenty-four hours later, the blue skies were replaced with grey cloud and strong winds, and as the peloton ventured north to Kjøllefjord on stage 2, the effect the exposed Arctic landscape could have on the race was laid bare. The gales didn’t just split the peloton into echelons, it blew some riders off their bikes, as if they were as light as paper planes. Warren Barguil was among the casualties. He lost control of his bike before being blown off the road into the rocky verge with 50km to race.
The incident was an apt metaphor for the way the Breton’s debut season with the Fortuneo-Samsic team has gone and he abandoned later that night. Wind-related crashes also saw the GC hopes of WantyGroupe Gobert’s Guillaume Martin and Israel Cycling Academy’s August Jensen blown away.
Jakob Fuglsang – rebuilding his form after the Tour de France for the upcoming Innsbruck World Championships – forced what looked like the decisive split on the day’s final climb, with his team-mate Chernetskii and BMC’s Alberto Bettiol in pursuit. Race leader Van der Poel was caught on the wrong side of a split caused by the wind, and that gave the overall advantage to Chernetski, which he would hold until the race’s end. Yet another change in the wind direction allowed an 11-rider group to bridge to the front trio with 5km to go, and it was the 24-yearold Rally Cycling rider, Colin Joyce, who snatched the win from under the WorldTour riders’ noses in the sprint. It was only the Idaho native’s second-ever pro victory.
Sandwiched between the Tour and the Vuelta and a month before the Worlds, the Arctic Race straddles the midsummer where riders and teams are building towards endof-season goals. August 1 is also the start of the transfer season, and at four days long, the Arctic Race is an ideal testing ground for stagiaires. Three WorldTour teams had brought at least one.
British national champion Connor Swift was one of two stagiaires riding for Dimension Data. Having raced for Conti team Madison-Genesis for two years, the 22-year-old Yorkshireman was making a big step up in level.
“It was just crosswind action, echelons, and that’s the first proper race that I’ve ever done where it was just carnage all day, it was just crazy,” Swift said after stage 2.
“I went back for bottles at just the wrong point, when it kicked off the second time, and that put me on the back foot…. It’s stunning, but it’s blummin’ hard racing.”
Swift seemed unfazed by the racing and conditions and on the following two days he met his baptism of fire head on by getting in the days’ main breaks.
Motivated to impress, like many young riders at the race, he came within three and 1.5 kilometres of contesting victories.
After a ferry transfer to Honningsvåg, and with the sun shining bright ahead of the 194km stage that travelled south along the coast to Hammerfest, stage 3 turned out to be the most routine. The veteran rider Bernie Eisel declared on the sign-on podium that it was a day for the breakaway. His experience proved right. The biggest novelty was the Nordkapp Tunnel. The 6.8km sub-sea tunnel went deep enough for the organisers to make the climb up to the mouth a cat 1 climb. Shortly after, a nine-rider break formed. Despite a chase, the lone breakaway rider Adam Toupalík survived to give Corendon-Circus their second stage win. The Czech was the silver medallist in the U23 cyclo-cross World Championships in 2016, and like Van der Poel, who led the sprint for second behind, he is primarily a cyclo-cross rider. The uphill finish to Alta on the final stage was Van der Poel’s to lose - the rider is having the summer of his young career. The rain clouds cleared just in time for the riders to begin the first of four laps of an 11km circuit, featuring the cat 2 climb of Thomasbakken, and with the remnants of the day’s breakaway swept up under the flamme rouge, the 4.5 per cent drag up to the line suited the Dutchman to a tee. He followed Roche when the BMC rider started to sprint, and went around him with such speed and power that there was yet more clear space between his back wheel and the second-placed Israel Cycling Academy’s Sondre Holst Enger.
This summer, Corendon-Circus announced plans to move up to ProContinental level next year. The move helped secure Van der Poel’s signature for the next five years and he will ride road, cross and mountain bike until 2023 for the team. The contract looks like one of the best deals of the year. Overall winner Chernetskii had a quiet race, but crucially avoided trouble and was always at the front. It was fitting perhaps that a race which began in Norway’s melting pot should end up with a Russian winner. The race also showcased talent that has so far lain undiscovered, such as 23-year-old Markus Hoelegaard, who finished second on general classification.
Dybdal hopes to use what he has learned at the race to bring more sport to the region, specifically the Alpine Skiing World Championships – the number-one sport in Norway. If the Arctic Tour shows anything, it is that even at its wildest fringes Norwegians love sport. “Now we have the possibility to show the pride that the people here have to stay and live where they are living,” says Dybdal. “Of course, it’s not warm all the months, but when we have this ownership, we have the opportunity to show these big sports events in northern Norway.”