Home victory for Akito Watabe in Hakuba

Akito Watabe has rewarded himself with a home victory in Hakuba, the fourth consecutive victory since his TRIPLE success in Seefeld. Watabe won dominantly, finishing one minute and 12 seconds ahead of Jan Schmid, who stays on Watabe’s heels in the overall World Cup. Manuel Faißt captured the remaining spot on the podium, +1:22 after Watabe.

Local hero Akito Watabe pleased the numerous spectators at his home town of Hakuba who cheered their favourite to a jumping victory. In changing conditions, Watabe came out on top with a jump of 130.5 metres and four times the judges’ score of 19.0, which put him in the lead with 136.4 points and a head start of 16 seconds on Estonia’s Kristjan Ilves.

Ilves, the winner of yesterday’s PCR, continued in fine form with 132 metres and 132.5 points. Germany’s Manuel Faißt stepped into the spotlight with a jump of 130 metres and a point total of 123.4 points. This meant a time disadvantage of 52 seconds but the intermediate third position for the German.

While the conditions were changing from head to tail wind and back, the strong Norwegian jumpers still came through with good performances and took the intermediate positions four to six. Jan Schmid continued his hunt for the yellow bib from position four and with a delay of one minute and eight seconds, Harald Riiber was fifth +1:18 and Sindre Ure Søtvik sixth, +1:27.

Of the fast skiers, Mikko Kokslien had the best starting position with rank 17 but had to contend with a time behind of two minutes and 38 seconds. Red-bib bearer Magnus Moan followed at +2:52.

The cross-country course is an unusual one with steep uhills, fast downhills and not much time to rest for the athletes but Akito Watabe was not to be deterred from achieving his home victory. He stayed in control of the field and had distanced Kristjan Ilves to over one minute at the halfway point of the race. From that moment on, no skier would come closer than one minute to Watabe, who had time to enjoy half of the last 2 km lap of the following skiers from the finish.

Schmid, out to minimise the damage in the overall World Cup standings, caught Manuel Faißt on the last steep uphill but both skiers had to fight hard to reach the end of the uphill at all. But with Schmid mobilising his last reserves, Faißt had no chance and missed the second rank by ten seconds at the finish line.

Even though Kristjan Ilves lost the podium, he still set a career-best result with rank four (+2:14), as well as Espen Bjørnstad on rank five. Mikko Kokslien stormed to a final sixth position, Go Yamamoto and Yoshito Watabe finished seventh and eighth and the Top Ten were completed by Terence Weber and Tomas Portyk.