Franz-Josef Rehrl uses home advantage to PCR win

Local hero Franz-Josef Rehrl was the best jumper on Ramsau am Dachstein’s HS 98 normal hill in the Provisional Competition Round preceding the last competition weekend of the calendar year 2018. Rehrl landed at 95 metres and with 133.1 points, he took the win over Norwegian World Cup overall leader Jarl Magnus Riiber.

Riiber had shown the longest jump of the competition round with 98.5 metres but did not stick the landing properly and received point deductions from the jumping judges. Both athletes, Rehrl and Riiber, started from one gate lower than the rest of the field after two coach requests. Should the PCR have to be used, nine seconds will separate Rehrl and Riiber.

Third in the ranking of the day was Yoshito Watabe (94.5 m; 123.8 p.), who beat older brother Akito (94.5 m 119.9 p.) and would follow the leading duo after 37 seconds. Akito had a start delay of 53 seconds. Just four seconds behind him, another Japanese followed with Go Yamamoto. The rest of the jumping Top Ten went to Mario Seidl (+1:03), Johannes Rydzek (+1:04), Vinzenz Geiger (+1:15) and last year’s winner Fabian Rießle (+1:16).

Superstar Eric Frenzel was not fully satisfied with his performance that only brought him to rank 29, starting one minute and 42 seconds after the tightly packed field. With Dmytro Mazurchuk (URK) disqualified and David Pommer, who chose to end his career as a Nordic Combined athlete not on start, four seconds did not get through the qualification part of the PCR: Italy’s Raffaele Buzzi, Russia’s Viacheslav Barkov and Ben Loomis and Jasper Good from the USA.