Cross-country skiing | Under 300 FIS points to qualify for the 2026 Olympics : the day of the great challenge has arrived for Simon Sancet, who took part in the qualifying race for the Trondheim Worlds

Cross-country skiing: Simon Sancet will try to secure his place at the 2026 Olympic Games

It’s the big day. This Thursday afternoon, at 3.36pm, 39-year-oldSimon Sancet from San Marino, wearing number 12, will start the individual 7.5km classic qualifying race for the World Cross-Country Skiing Championships in Trondheim (Norway).

For this Doubiste with dual nationality via his maternal ancestry (his grandfather from San Marino emigrated to Normandy in the last century), this race is phenomenally important: it’s his only chance of securing a place at the Milan/Cortina 2026 Olympic Games, the challenge he set himself a few months ago.

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To achieve this, Simon Sancet – whose training is devised by his friend Frédéric Jean and accompanied on site by Salomé Letoublon – needs to score less than 300 FIS points in this qualifying race.

“Theoretically, it should be possible, but it’s complicated to know whether it will be possible because I don’t know the level of my opponents, some of whom are 15 or 20 years younger than me,” he tells Nordic Magazine.

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A gigantic competition site

After arriving in Granåsen last Friday, San Marino’s first ever cross-country skier found the infrastructure to be gigantic.

“I’d never seen anything like it, especially the width of the slopes. Everything is so big! On the loop of our qualifying race, it’s all uphill and downhill apart from the half-turn in the stadium. I don’t know how I’m going to react to this effort”, he says, despite the fact that the snow in the stadium was still unkillable during the official training session on Tuesday. “ It was tiled”, lamented Simon Sancet, who will also be taking part in the skate sprint on Thursday.

Last but not least, there will be a number of familiar names on the French national circuit at the start of this qualifying race, with Nigeria’s Samuel Ikpefan and Haiti’s Stevenson Savart also taking part.

• The full programme for the cross-country skiing, Nordic combined and ski jumping world championships in Trondheim, the highlight of the 2024/2025 season
• “It’s a real challenge”: Simon Sancet has set himself the challenge of taking part in the 2026 Olympic Games in the colours of San Marino.