Cross Country Skiing at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games:

The sprint event was new to the Olympic Program in 2002, having first been contested at the 2001 World Championships. It consisted of approximately a 1,500 metre course, with a qualifying round in which the 16 fastest skiers advanced to match racing. Match racing began with four quarter-finals of four racers each, with the top two races in each heat advancing in each round, to get to a final of four racers. The qualifying round was led by Czech Kateřina Neumannová, the World Cup leader in the event in 2001-02, with Russian Yuliya Chepalova in second. Chepalova had won an Olympic individual medal, the 30 km in 1998, but had now elected to contest the sprint as well. Neumannová surprisingly went out in the quarter-final, while Chepalova advanced to the final, which seemingly offered little competition, as the other finalists had no sprint reputation. Chepalova was expected to win and she did so fairly easily, defeating Germany’s Evi Sachenbacher, who had qualified third, by 1.6 seconds, a big margin in a sprint.