Athlete of the Week: Fabian Rießle (GER)

While the season 2019/20 was probably not all that World Championship and Olympic medallist Fabian Rießle had hoped for, it ended on a positive note for the 29-year-old from Germany’s Black Forest region. The second place in Oslo marked his season best-result and the third individual podium in a winter in which it was notoriously difficult to conquer one of the coveted top 3 finishes.

Despite all difficulties, Rießle managed to do exactly that three times this winter, with two third places in Lillehammer and Ramsau and now the final second place in Oslo. With 658 points, the German finished as a solid fifth in the overall, only beaten by the clear German number one this winter, Vinzenz Geiger. While this is a slight down from Rießle’s best years in 2016 and 2018, when he claimed the third position in the overall, it was three places up from his eighth-place finish last winter.

Alongside the German team, Rießle struggled with the ski jumping portion of the event, while the Norwegian team around World Cup dominator Jarl Magnus Riiber shone. But Rießle has always been known more as a fast skier than a strong ski jumper and his predisposition towards the skinny skis was also visible in his second-place finish this weekend. Not only was the German able to take on the fastest skier of the season, Ilkka Herola, in the race, he also used his sprinting prowess to wrestle the second place from the Finn on the final stretch.

It is at times like this, when his jumps are working that the resident of St. Märgen is at his most dangerous. Starting his race with a delay of “only” +1:18, Rießle even had World Cup winner Jarl Magnus Riiber slightly nervous and looking over his shoulder at the start of the race.

While there still remains a way to go for Rießle and the rest of the German team to put some serious pressure on Riiber and the strong ski jumpers of the field, this final second place in Oslo should bring the hope back that everything’s possible in Nordic Combined and things might look different after a summer of training and hard work.

And so even if his home venue of Schonach (GER) was not able to host the finals this year due to the warm weather, the season still ends with a burst of “Schwarzwald power”. Congrats to our Athlete of the Week, Fabian Rießle.