By Philip O’Connor and Mitch Phillips
ZHANGJIAKOU, China (Reuters) -Norway’s Johannes Klaebo and Jonna Sundling of Sweden took home the gold medals in electrifying Olympic sprint finals under the lights at the National Cross-country Centre on Tuesday.
Sundling won all her heats and stormed to a stunning victory in the final ahead of her compatriot Maja Dahlqvist, with Jessie Diggins of the United States holding off fellow American Rosie Brennan to pick up the bronze.
Wearing bib number one, Sundling crushed everyone in her path, taking victory in the final by a margin of 2.88 seconds from Dahlqvist in a sport where athletes often lunge over the line to win by millimetres.
Diggins, who broke an American cross-country medal drought going back to 1976 with her team sprint victory in 2018 alongside Kikkan Randall, dug deep again with a typically gutsy, come-from-behind performance.
Klaebo made the most of the absence of recently-crowned skiathlon champion Alexander Bolshunov to grab his first gold of the Games, with Italian Federico Pellegrino taking silver and Alexander Terentev bronze for the Russian Olympic Committee.
Klaebo was out for revenge after a poor performance in the skiathlon race on Sunday and he got it in the final, bursting out of the gate and holding off the early challenge of young Swede Oskar Svensson.
The rest of the six-man field could not match his power on the uphill climbs and he crossed the line 0.26 seconds ahead of Pellegrino, whose semi-final lunge had given him an unlikely berth in the final.
(Reporting by Mitch Phillips, Editing by Ed Osmond)
