Wickholm goes wicked fast

Finnish runner Jörgen Wickholm won the second stage of the Sylvester 5 days. In the detailed sand dune terrain of "De Zwarte Bergen", he was three minutes faster than yesterday's WRE winner Pieter Hendrickx, despite Hendrickx being satisfied with his performance today*. Swiss runner Daniel Zwiker caught up with Ken Peeters at control 9 and together they could run at a good pace to a very good result (places 3 and 5).

Jörgen Wickholm (photo: WorldOfO)

Also encouraging was Alexander Lubina's performance today. After being ill for most of the month and a disappointing result yesterday, the German arrow was happy today with his 6th place:

sylvester 5 days, day 2: 50:23 nice terrain, but very soft underground, better feeling than yesterday, small misses

Many other runners who made a top 10 result yesterday, were absent today. Some were expected to run only one stage, but we missed some others. Let's hope they'll make it for the next days.

In the women's class, Greet Oeyen won her second race in two days. She was just one minute faster than Veerle Tulleneers. The final place on the winners rostrum was for Kim Geypen, who had coach orders to not be faster than 8 min/km, and succeeded in doing that (8'04), but still finished in a decent time.

Yesterday's second place Sabrina Meriheinä missed a few controls today and had to settle for 6th place, some 7 minutes behind. She had to tolerate Saartje Sallaerts and Ewa Fiuk in between her and the podium.

Tomorrow, the military base of Grobbendonk will be where the competition will take place. Expect a dense path network, sand dunes in between and some wet areas.

Results
Splits
Map (Alexander Lubina)

Let's check the comebacks we mentioned yesterday:
Dennis Ducro: 30th place HE +27'
Kim Wallaert: DSQ HE
Elien Melis: 9th DE +19'
Maarten Hoekx 12th SD +16'
It looks like some training will be required for them to reach their shape of years ago. Tomorrow we'll see if Wim Peers found his tak-tak-tak feeling for the race in Grobbendonk.

* Hendrickx complained about yesterday's report, we wrote he made mistakes, but he insisted he made just one. We stand corrected. Hendrickx also complained about the photo. We dug it up from our personal archive in a hurry. Our excuses. Finally, there were complaints by Hendrickx about the flash interview we published in our report. The contents were taken from an interview with Ken Peeters who had an altered view of the events in the forest. Hendrickx also said he didn't speak Arendonks anymore, he speaks Reties instead. We would like to apologise for the harm these errors on our part have caused.