Live broadcast: First single skater to fly to the World Cup Finals in Planica

In the first of two individual ski flying competitions this weekend, ski jumpers will fight for important World Cup points for the penultimate time. While hunting long distances in Planica, the Eagles are looking for logs. skijumping.com Direct reports!

The Ski Jumping World Cup Finals are traditionally held in Planica, Slovenia. At the end of the longest ski jumping season ever, there are a total of three competitions in the program on the famous ski hill Letalnica: two people and one team.

In addition to the monster hill in Vikersund, Norway, which the ski jumpers jumped two weeks ago as part of the Raw Air Tour, Letalnica is the world’s largest ski jump. The world record for snowboarding trips remains in Norway, but most experts agree that future records can only be set in Planica.

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“It gets very flat very quickly on the bottom. You can’t currently jump more than 245 here – or at least it’s not fun anymore. I don’t think we’ll see a world record here,” Wellinger said in an interview over the weekend in Vikersund skijumping.com. The current hill record in Planica by Ryoyu Kobayashi is 252 metres, and the world record in Vikersund by Stefan Kraft is just one and a half meters over a distance of 253.5 metres.

The German national team competes in the World Cup finals weekend on the legendary ski hill with a total of seven athletes. In addition to Andreas Wellinger, Karl Geiger, Markus Eisenbichler, Konstantin Schmid, Felix Hoffmann and Martin Hamann participated in the first. Pius Paschke returns to the team at the end of the season. In Thursday’s qualifiers, only Martin Hamann was eliminated early.

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“Pius replaces the ailing Justin Lisso,” national team coach Stefan Horngacher explained before leaving for Slovenia’s “Valley of the Hills.” “We want to say goodbye to Planica with his good performances this season. It is understood that the active batteries are largely empty. However, he looks forward Everyone in the team to the traditional end of the season in Slovenia.”

The German hope lies primarily with Carl Geiger, who won the downhill skiing world title in 2020, and the powerful Andreas Wellinger recently. Germany’s only World Cup winner of the season said before that: “I want to show good flights again and finish the season with a good performance and positive impressions.”

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But the frontrunners are different this weekend: Halvor Egner Granerud of Norway, who was already a World Cup overall winner, is also one of the narrower favourites, as are the overall strong Austrian Stefan Kraft and the local Slovenian champions around Timi Zajc and Anze Lanisek.

The time trial round starts at 2pm, followed by the individual competition at 3pm. In addition to the live blog at this point, skisprung.com also gives you a chance To follow all the jumps in the live FIS tape.