Cross-country skiing at the 1980 Winter Olympics

At the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid , 7 sets of awards were won in cross-country skiing - 4 for men (15 km, 30 km, 50 km and 4 × 10 km relay) and 3 for women (5 km, 10 km and relay 4 × 5 km). The competition program has not changed in comparison with the 1976 Olympic Games in Innsbruck . All races, except relay races, were held with a separate start of the participants.

The competition was held from February 14 to 21 in a complex specially built for the Games at the foot of Mount Van Hovenberg. The competition was attended by 131 athletes (86 men and 45 women) from 24 countries.

In the overall medal standings in skiing, the Soviet skiers became the best, having won 4 gold, 2 silver and 1 bronze. 24-year-old Olympic debutant Nikolai Zimyatov became a three-time Olympic champion (30 km, 50 km and relay), and took 4th place at a distance of 15 km. Before Zimyatov, not a single man managed to win 3 gold in one Games. The illustrious Galina Kulakova (the oldest participant in cross-country skiing in Lake Placid) won her eighth and final award in her 4th Olympic career - silver in the relay (Kulakova won the ski relay medal at the 4th Olympic Games in a row).

Representatives of the GDR won their first ever gold medals in cross-country skiing: 24-year-old Barbara Petzold unexpectedly won gold at a distance of 10 km, and in the relay the women's team of the GDR in the fight for first place won more than a minute at the finish line with the USSR team. East Germany became the 6th country after Norway, Sweden, Finland, the USSR and Italy, which managed to win Olympic gold in cross-country skiing. After 1980, representatives of the GDR never won the cross-country skiing race at the Olympics.

Having won bronze at a distance of 30 km, Ivan Lebanov brought Bulgaria not only the first Olympic award in skiing in history, but also at the Winter Olympics in general. As of the beginning of the Sochi 2014 Games, Bulgarians no longer won Olympic cross-country skiing awards.

The men's 15 km race was remembered for the fact that the winner Thomas Wassberg beat the silver medalist Juha Mieto with an advantage of only 0.01 seconds - the smallest possible (despite the fact that it was a race with a separate start). Wassberg suggested that Mieto cut their medals into 2 parts and combine so that everyone would get a unique gold-silver award. Mieto rejected this offer. . Interestingly, in 1972, at the Sapporo Games, Mieto fell into a similar situation in the 15-kilometer race, when he lost only 0.06 seconds to the Norwegian Ivar Formo in the fight for bronze. Shortly after the Lake Placid Games, the International Ski Federation decided that skiing results would be measured to the nearest 0.1 sec.