Rehrl jumps to PCR victory in Otepää - with borrowed skis

The Provisional Competition Round in Otepää (EST) wrote one of the more astonishing stories today: Austria’s Franz Josef Rehrl won the PCR with a distance of 95 metres and a total of 120.4 points, all that with borrowed skis.

What had happened? The Austrian team's skis (as well as the Italian's) collectively went missing on the plane trip to Estonia and it was not possible to have them delivered to Otepää on time for the training and Provisional Competition Round on Friday morning. As usual in these cases, the Nordic Combined family is very supportive and a number of other teams lent their extra sets of skis to enable the athletes without skis to participate.

In Franz-Josef Rehrl’s case Poland’s Sczepan Kupczak’s skis seemed to been quite the fit as the Austrian even managed to beat jumping prodigy Jarl Magnus Riiber, even if it will only be three seconds separating the two at the start line should the PCR have to be used. Riiber jumped to 96.5 metres and had a point total pf 119.7 points. Riiber’s teammate Espen Bjørnstad was third with 95.5 metres (118.5 p.).

Also Mario Seidl seemed to be doing well on borrowed skis, achieving the fourth position with a time delay of only nine seconds at the start. Akito Watabe was fifth (+0:11), Ernest Yahin sixth (+0:30), Terence Weber seventh (+0:33), Manuel Faißt eighth (+0:40), Martin Fritz ninth (+0:46) and Go Yamamoto completed the Top Ten with a start delay of +0:48.

With winds changing slightly from head to tailwind, Italy’s Raffaele Buzzi had to battle heavy conditions and also Germany’s Fabian Rießle was further back than he was used to with rank 36 and a delay of two minutes and 32 seconds. Norwegian Harald Johnas Riiber was disqualified.

Final Results