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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Sport
Daniel Moxon

Cross-country skier suffers frozen penis at Winter Olympics – 'Pain was unbearable'

Cross-country skiing can be a brutal sport at the best of times, but at the Winter Olympics it left one unlucky racer with an "unbearable" injury.

In icy-cold temperatures, athletes must cover a lengthy course which typically sees them burn more than 1,000 calories per hour.

The men's 50km mass start event in Beijing was made even more treacherous by freezing winds which swept across the course.

Organisers took the decision to bring the distance down to 30km to reduce the risk of frostbite, though that decision was unpopular with some including Andrew Musgrave of Team GB.

Sadly for Remi Lindholm, that measure didn't prevent the cold from freezing a particularly sensitive area during the race.

The Finnish skier revealed after the race he had suffered a frozen penis during his 76 minutes on the course.

Remi Lindholm suffered from a frozen penis while competing at the Winter Olympics (Getty Images)

"You can guess which body part was a little bit frozen when I finished," he told Finnish outlet IL .

"It was one of the worst competitions I've been in. It was just about battling through."

Incredibly, it is not the first time he has suffered from such a bizarre injury – he first experienced a similar problem while racing in Ruka, in his homeland, last year.

That previous experience helped him to know what to do to remedy the problem when the race was over, but when he applied a heat pack the pain was worse this time.

"When the body parts started to warm up after the finish, the pain was unbearable," he added.

Sadly Lindholm could not take a medal in the event to make up for his discomfort, finishing 28th and some way off the leaders in the truncated race.

It was won by Russian Olympic Committee athlete Alexander Bolshunov, who collected a third cross-country skiing gold medal of these Games after dominating the field.

In total he won five medals in Beijing, added to the four he took home from PyeongChang in 2018 to make what has become an impressive personal haul of nine.

Lindholm was quick to apply a heat pack once he had crossed the finish line (Getty Images)

He won this race by being patient and waiting for the final lap of the 7.1km course to pounce and race clear of the rest of the front-runners.

Fellow ROC skier Ivan Yakimushkin finished six seconds behind in second place, just ahead of Norway's Simen Hegstad Krueger who took bronze.

Britain's Andrew Musgrave put in an admirable performance to finish 12th out of the 61-strong field, a significant improvement on his 46th-placed finish in the 15km classic event.

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