Many a dream of a German victory in the Four Hills Tournament in the snow of Innsbruck ended on the Bergisel in Innsbruck. The mountain is regarded as the mountain of destiny for German ski jumpers, who actually like the hill. A real tragedy puts all sporting annoyances into perspective.
Karl Geiger was served at the beginning of January 2021: “At the moment I’m pretty pissed off and don’t expect anything from the overall standings anymore. But I don’t care either,” complained the actually extremely level-headed Allgäu native on January 4th in Innsbruck. With a disastrous first jump he threw away every chance to follow in Sven Hannawald’s footsteps. He had won the Four Hills Tournament in 2002, something no German has been able to repeat since. “The fact that it’s the same again this year just makes you throw up. I’m sorry for the choice of words,” Geiger said at the time at Eurosport, frustrated. It’s just “filthy bitter”.
In the end, the German fought for a strong second place in the overall standings of the 69th Four Hills Tournament, but in Innsbruck he had already lost the tour win. “I have to shut down the system a bit first. At the moment I could really step in anywhere. I don’t really know myself like that. But it’s emotional,” he said on ARD. The anger of the later double world champion was just another in the long series of German frustration experiences on the Olympic ski jump in 1964 and 1976, which had long since been rebuilt several times.
Now the world’s ski jumping elite is once again gathered on the slope overlooking the Innsbruck cemetery, which has meanwhile earned a reputation as the “Mountain of Destiny for the Germans”. Bergisel is to ski jumpers what Nanga Parbat is to alpinists. A look at the long history of jumping shows why.
In 1999 Martin Schmitt was at the peak of his abilities, the hype surrounding young German ski jumpers was slowly approaching boiling point. Schmitt traveled to the tour as the World Cup leader, and the then 20-year-old won in Oberstdorf and Garmisch-Partenkirchen. He later defended his title as overall World Cup winner and became world champion in the individual and with the team. In Innsbruck, however, everything went wrong: instead of continuing the run, Schmitt fell in difficult conditions in the qualification, in the competition it was only enough for 13th place.
“I’m just a human being and not a machine. You can’t do anything about that, I just couldn’t cope with the hill,” Schmitt commented at the time and wrote off the overall victory: “I lost the tournament, it doesn’t make any sense anymore if I attack again in Bischofshofen.” The attack didn’t materialize either: in Bischofshofen the high-flyer landed in 14th place and slipped down from third place in the tour rankings.
In 2002, Sven Hannawald fared very differently from Martin Schmitt in 1999 and Karl Geiger in the past year. On his way to sporting immortality, after his triumphs in Oberstdorf and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, he also won the jumping at Bergisel – and two days later he was the first jumper to sail to the Grand Slam in Bischofshofen. 18 years after Jens Weißflog, who won for himself and the GDR in Austria in 1984, there was celebration in black, red and gold again for the first time.
The competition in Innsbruck, as Hannawald blurted out at the time, was “a really great bombshell. It’s sensational. I don’t get it at all. Despite all the nerve pressure, I just manage to do phenomenal things.” In the first round he shattered all the faint hopes of the competition with a hill record of 134.5 meters. Hannawald left Innsbruck with an equivalent of 24 meters ahead of Adam Malysz, who was second overall. The rest is sports history.
However, a golden era did not dawn for the German jumpers in the narrow Bergisel basin: After Hannawald’s miracle flights in 2002, it took another 13 years until the next DSV athlete was at the top. Richard Freitag was the last German to win in 2015. But the memories of Innsbruck are also badly clouded for the Saxon: In 2018 Freitag was the German hope for a tournament victory, after the first two competitions the gap to the leading Kamil Stoch was only 11.8 points.
Freitag, who ended his career in 2022, came to Bergisel as the overall World Cup leader and in great shape. But in the first round all dreams died within seconds: Freitag landed at a strong 130 meters, but he fell and injured himself. He was in “very bad pain,” said the national coach at the time, Werner Schuster, and instead of going into the second round, he was hospitalized on Friday. The anger in the German camp was great: “It was definitely too much of a start. There is a technical delegate here who is pursuing a different strategy. It was extremely difficult,” said Schuster on ZDF. In Bischofshofen, Friday was no longer at the start.
The former overall World Cup winner Severin Freund, who was the best German in qualifying in 2022 and ended his career a few weeks later, was also on course for “tournament victory” – until he came to Innsbruck. Freund won in Oberstdorf in 2016 and came third in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Only eight points separated him from leader Peter Prevc in the overall standings.
In the trial run on the Bergisel, Freund then hit his back on the snow and sustained a painful hip injury. In pain he was able to finish the competition and finally the tour, but in Innsbruck he lost eleven points to the eventual overall winner Prevc. “It was wonderful and was a lot of fun – with a small moment of shock and a few injuries,” Freund said after his final second place in Bischofshofen, with a small reference to his fall in Innsbruck.
Markus Eisenbichler, who finished the 2021/2022 tour in fifth place, has his own eventful history on Innsbruck’s local mountain. “The Bergisel is just a blede pig from time to time,” said Eisenbichler in 2021 after his friend and roommate Geiger had sealed his tour fate. Because of the stressful history, the German ski jumping team had trained several times at Bergisel in the summer of 2021. “We even took our scientists with us, set up cameras and technically readjusted ourselves to the hill,” reported Horngacher.
The second round in January 2019 also went really badly: Eisenbichler was the only one to stand up to the outstanding Ryoyu Kobayashi, 4.2 points separated the two after the first two tournament competitions. But 123.5 meters was far too little after a passable first round, the Japanese jumped almost 15 meters further in the daily classification.
Things didn’t go any better two months later in the same place: “I’m overjoyed, I feel a lot of adrenaline, I’m shaking right now,” said Eisenbichler. “That was one of my hottest jumps ever. Now I’m world champion, I can’t believe it,” Eisenbichler rejoiced on February 23, 2019, a few minutes after becoming world champion on the large hill at Bergisel – in front of Geiger. “Both have already shown in qualifying with places one and two that they can get along here,” said the national coach at the time, Werner Schuster.
In the early afternoon (from 1.30 p.m. / ZDF and in the live ticker on ntv.de) it starts again on the slope above Innsbruck: The ski jumpers start qualifying for the third competition of the Four Hills Tournament 2022/2023.
The tournament winner seems to have already been determined, Halvor Egner Granerud jumps too strongly and consistently, the Norwegian won in Oberstdorf and Garmisch-Partenkirchen. But others have already lost the tour at Bergisel. In any case, a preliminary decision will be made today, at least statistically: 23 times in the last actual Four Hills Tournament, the ski jumper who traveled to Bischofshofen from Innsbruck as the leader won the overall ranking.
The Germans have nothing to do with the overall victory this year. Because Granerud and the Poles Piotr Zyla and the World Cup leader Dawid Kubacki came to the tour in very good form and because Karl Geiger is fighting for the naturalness of a top jumper. After a strong fourth place at the start, the world champion in the New Year’s competition with place ten and a clear deficit already lost contact with the top. “A third place overall is still possible, everything else is utopian,” said Horngacher in view of Geiger’s 32 meters behind the sovereign leader Granerud – the Pole Zyla in third place is ten meters away.
Geiger doesn’t want to look at the overall standings at all, but at least annoy Granerud and Kubacki, who is second overall: “The goal is to give them a slap in the face. To show that we’re still there.” That could work out in Innsbruck, Geiger celebrated great successes on this hill, was vice world champion in 2019 behind his teammate Markus Eisenbichler, who is now in such weak form and who is at least continuing the tour, and with him team world champion. “I’ve already bitten my teeth there, but I’ve also had good competitions,” said Geiger: “Now I’m just going there very curious – I have nothing to lose.”
For Markus Eisenbichler, the jumping at Bergisel must be a step back to old strength: The Bavarian did not even make it into the second round in Oberstdorf or in Garmisch. Eisenbichler himself had already climbed into the car to Innsbruck with the best prospects of at least a podium place: that was in 2017, in the end he was a big loser in a wild wind lottery. The 112 meters from the first round was more of a hop, in 29th place he just saved himself in the second round to be able to repair a bit.
“Woe, they’re breaking off,” he begged, but the jury was running out of time: Because there were no floodlights on the Bergisel even after the most recent renovation, after a long first round it was just one jump for everyone. Eisenbichler, who fell back to 6th place in the overall standings, was to blame for the bad jump, but not with others: “I’m more annoyed that I was a little too early at the table. My God, it was just windy. Sometimes it’s good , sometimes it’s bad,” said Eisenbichler.
And yet he likes the hill: “Innsbruck is tricky, but a beautiful hill when the weather is good,” he once said. Last year, Eisenbichler delivered a fantastic jump of 139 meters in training, and in qualifying it was solid with eighth place.
But he didn’t want to look at the weather report again before jumping on the extremely wind-prone hill, where “quite often bizarre things have happened” (Horngacher). “For what? I can’t change it anyway. Should I then text Petrus and say: ‘You friend, can you do a bit more sunshine?'” He should have written better: Because in 2022 there was finally no jumpers in “Windsbruck”: gusts of up to 8 meters per second finally led to the cancellation of the jumping after a long wait, the Four Hills Tournament became a Three Hills Tournament with two jumps in Bischofshofen for the second time ever.
But all this is just sport, it’s about winning and losing, nothing more. It was also a matter of life and death at the Bergisel, the “Bergisel tragedy” has terribly burned itself into the collective memory, not only in Tyrol. On December 4, 1999, eleven months after Martin Schmitt fell far behind here and just a month before the tour returned to Innsbruck, a moment came at a snowboarding event in the packed, maybe overcrowded, Bergisel Stadium , in which real fate really struck mercilessly: Five girls lost their lives when they left the boiler, two other young women succumbed years later to their serious injuries. Another 38 people were injured, some seriously, and four are still dependent on care. They were crushed and rolled over by a human roller that made its way out of the stadium at the west exit.
“Police officers had to fire warning shots to clear the way for paramedics to the victims and to prevent paramedics from being trampled themselves,” wrote the ORF. A culprit for the drama was not found, various processes ultimately led to acquittals.
This text was first published, slightly modified, on January 4, 2022.