James Southam of Anchorage raced in Saturday's 30-kilometer mass-start pursuit race at the Winter Olympics at Whistler Olympic Park in British Columbia. And from the get-go, it was a far different world than his previous mass start, last month at the national championships at Kincaid Park.
"It's a whole other ball game," he said in a phone interview. "It's a little like playing AA ball and then going to the World Series. It's a whole other world."
One of 64 racers in the field, Southam placed 34th to finish as the top American for the second time in these Olympics. He took a spill on a slushy corner on a downhill with two kilometers left in the classic portion of the dual-technique race, a stumble that he said cost him a top-30 finish.
Even so, he was much happier than he was after Monday's 15-kilometer freestyle, where he finished 48th among 95 racers, getting slower and feeling worse as the race got longer.
In the 30-K pursuit -- which features 15 kilometers of classic skiing and 15 kilometers of skate skiing -- he got faster and felt stronger with each passing lap.
"It's a step in the right direction," Southam said. "The 15-K was kind of a slow fade, and today was a steady build, which is a good sign for the 50-K (next Sunday)."
On a cloudless day when temperatures once again hit 52 degrees, the battle for the gold medal was as hot as the weather.
Sweden's Marcus Hellner outdueled Tobias Angerer of Germany and Johann Olsson of Sweden to claim victory in 1 hour, 15 minutes, 11.4. He was 2.1 seconds ahead of Angerer and 2.8 ahead of Olsson.
Southam lagged 5:34.8 behind Hellner but was more than two minutes ahead of teammate Kris Freeman, who was 7:51.2 behind the winner in 45th place. Andrew Musgave, a skier for Great Britain who learned to ski while living in Anchorage as a child, was 51st, 8:56.6 behind Hellner.
Blood-sugar problems doomed Freeman, a New Hampshire skier who is diabetic. He hit the ground about halfway through the race and might have had to quit had it not been for a nearby German coach, who gave him some Gatorade and some energy gel.
"All of a sudden, my body wasn't working," Freeman told reporters after the race. "If the coach hadn't come over, I thought I was going to have to walk back to the finish line.
The race was considered Freeman's best shot for a breakthrough Olympic performance.
"I'm crushed," said Freeman, who also had a disappointing 15-K freestyle race Monday. "I don't know what's happened. I've been skiing towards this for four years and it's my worst nightmare."
The heat -- which has pretty much been a constant at Whistler since the Olympics began -- prompted eight racers to drop out.
"It was hot out there," said Southam, who made a point of taking a feed on each of the race's eight laps to ward off dehydration. "And the snow wasn't particularly fast. It wasn't easy skiing, by any means."
And yet he left the race encouraged by the fact he got better along the way, despite the heat and despite his tumble, which happened on a downhill corner when he lost his balance in some slush.
Southam isn't a regular member of the U.S. Ski Team and was considered a bit of a long shot to make the Olympic team once the U.S. team was downsized by a new quota system. But he has skied his way onto the last three World Championship teams and the last two Olympic teams, and now he owns the top American finish in two of the three Olympic races in Whistler. He's showing that when people talk about the best in the country, the talk should include Southam .
"For a couple of years I feel like I've been among the top two, top three," he said. "I think I deserve to be in that conversation."
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