Bad Gastein Prologue, live.

One kilometre to open a season

The shortest race on the Ski Classics calendar, and the one that starts everything: a single kilometre, one skier at a time, in the middle of town.

The Bad Gastein Prologue is skied on Friday 11 December 2026 in Bad Gastein, in Austria’s Gastein valley. It is a 1 km individual start in classic technique, set against the backdrop of the town centre: the town where, as the organiser points out, the Bad Gastein Waterfall drops 341 metres straight through the middle. The women start from 16:10 CET and the men from 16:45 CET, on a Friday afternoon in town.

The Prologue opens Ski Classics Season XVIII and is the first race counting toward the series’ world championship. It also starts something new: Ski Classics’ first-ever Tour Competition, four races across two weekends in the Gastein area, which closes eight days later with the 36 km Bad Gastein Criterium at Sportgastein. Over a single kilometre there is little room to recover from a bad start, and a skier’s place in the Tour is shaped from the first metre.

A one-kilometre race is over in minutes, so a live map matters less here than on the long-distance weekends that follow. What a Livebib broadcast does offer is a single place to follow a skier through the whole Tour: the skier shares a link, and family and friends open it in a browser with no account and no app, to see position on the course line and distance covered. Anything estimated is marked as estimated, never shown as measured, and the skier decides who gets the link.