Watabe untouchable on Day 2 of the TRIPLE

With a stellar performance on day two of the TRIPLE in Seefeld, Japan’s Akito Watabe proved that he is untouchable at the moment. Watabe started and finished the race first, with an advantage of one minute and 5 seconds on Vinzenz Geiger, who was the surprise of the day. The young German achieved a career best with a stellar finish of the race. He beat Jarl Magnus Riiber by three seconds, who in turn managed to stay clear of teammates Jan Schmid and Espen Andersen, as well as Fabian Rießle.

Watabe had won the jumping round with a nearly perfect jump of 106 metres, Also the judges saw Watabe’s achievement and rewarded him with scores of 19, 19, 19, 19 and 19.5. With a point total of 140.5 points, he started the 10 km race with a 25 second lead on Jarl Riiber. Fabian Rießle defended his third position with a jump of 99.5 metres and had to contend with a time disadvantage of one minute and 24 seconds at the start of the race.

While these three athletes were certainly fighting for the podium, the positions four until ten were close: fourth-placed Yoshito Watabe started at +1:37, tenth-place Jørgen Graabak had a delay of +1:58 at the start. In this group fighting for the third position were World Cup leader Jan Schmid, teammate Espen Andersen, Vinzenz Geiger and Kristjan Ilves. German superstars Eric Frenzel and Johannes Rydzek started with time behinds of +2:26 and +2:57.

The race was a lonely affair for Akito Watabe but the Japanese superstar did not show any signs of weakness. He kept adding seconds to Riiber’s time behind and in the end, all pursuers fell back over one minute compared to Watabe’s time.

Behind Watabe, Riiber skied a courageous race as well. Alone for long stretches, the young Norwegian held firm and it almost looked like he could keep the yesterday’s “rocket man” Fabian Rießle at bay. Beating Rießle succeeded, mainly because the German was caught by a pursuing group consisting of Jan Schmid, Vinzenz Geiger and Espen Andersen and then had nothing more to add.

Unfortunately for Riiber, another athlete found his inner turbo today: young German and Rydzek club-mate Vinzenz Geiger seemed to switch into another gear on the last lap and propelled himself out of the pursuing group and even past Riiber on the final metres of the race. The second rank gave him a new career-best and definitely justifies Geiger’s Olympic nomination.

Riiber, Schmid and Andersen were a Norwegian trio on ranks 3-5, Rießle finished sixth, Lukas Klapfer seventh and Jørgen Graabak won yet another photon finish, this time against Eero Hirvonen for position eight. Eric Frenzel completed the Top Ten on rank ten.

As only the top 30 athletes are eligible to start, we will not see USA’s Taylor Fletcher, Takehiro Watanabe (JPN) and Tim Hug (SUI) again. Also out are Philipp Orter (AUT), Miroslav Dvorak (CZE), Leevi Mutru (FIN), Szczepan Kupczak (POL) and Karl-August Tiirmaa (EST).