The German ski jumpers experience a bitter season for months – with the Four Hills Tournament as the low point. But at the high point of the season, the team works its way out of the crisis – and wins two medals at the same time. A Pole with a tremendous race to catch up becomes world champion.
The two German ski jumpers Andreas Wellinger and Karl Geiger surprisingly won silver and bronze at the World Championships in Slovenia. Wellinger was second only to Poland’s Piotr Zyla. Geiger was happy about third place. Wellinger and Geiger gave the German Ski Association their third and fourth precious metal in Planica within a few hours. Previously, the German ski jumpers around Katharina Althaus had won gold as a team.
Wellinger jumped a strong 101 and 102 meters on the normal hill. Wellinger was already in second place after the first round, Geiger was third. The competition was extremely tight: At half-time there was less than 2.5 meters between leader Stefan Kraft from Austria and tenth-placed top favorite Halvor Egner Granerud.
The Pole Zyla, who started as the defending champion, was still in 13th place after the first round – and then left jumper after jumper behind with the hill record of 105 meters. Kraft, who had been in the lead after the first round, was the big loser of the tight race: With only 99 meters, he not only gave up victory with the last jump of the competition, but ultimately jumped just a few tenths completely past the medal ranks. Constantin Schmid took seventh place as the third best German. Markus Eisenbichler ended up in 13th place.
With the result from Planica, the DSV team finally achieved a small sporting resurrection. Before that, the team even had a season without a World Cup victory for a long time. The German team had no chance at the Four Hills Tournament. The athletes from the German Ski Association also jumped behind in most of the other World Cups. Others set the standards – above all the Norwegian Granerud, but also Dawid Kubacki from Poland. But with Andreas Wellinger’s World Cup victory in Lake Placid in February, after a tough training phase, the turnaround was achieved.
