I would say notable skis today belonged to...

Chris Cook for skiing an excellent quarterfinal and bringing himself up to 20th place from qualifying in 30th. It was pretty amazing to watch him move up through the field on the uphill.

Reid Pletcher for 35th, under 2seconds out of qualifying... not bad for a first WC appearace.

Vahur Teppan, skiing for Estonia, in 19th. But Vahur deserves to be mentioned since he's skiing NCAA's for UAF.

Newell skied well, 17th, not great for him but I'd be pretty happy to beat Axel Teichmann if that was me.

Saddest ski today was when Koos broke a pole on the first corner in his quarterfinal after qualifying 7th. And it seemed to take f-o-r-e-v-e-r for him to change his pole. He did make up an impressive amount of time on the pack after that but still couldn't catch them. I did spot a couple of kids that had the part of his pole that broke off and they seemed psyched about such a sweet WC memento.

The course made for some crazy skiing. Three straight up switchbacks, one of which was a 180 turn. Some of the guys opted to double pole the course and with the long downhill and long double pole into the finish that seemed to pay off for them. The Norwegians absolutely dominated the men's race. Seriously dominated, as in swept the top 5.