The Face-off: Best Ski Jumpers 2019/20

With the season 2020/21 only ten weeks away, we will put our attention on possible contenders for a season peppered with highlights: The Nordic Combined TRIPLE trophy, a crystal globe and World Championship medals are up for grabs this winter.

As the Summer Grand Pix 2020 fell victim to the Covid-19 pandemic, guesses for the upcoming winter’s top athletes are especially hard this year but the past has shown that top stars in Nordic Combined usually display an amazing level of consistency over multiple years.

The top-ranked athletes in different categories across the men’s and women’s fields will therefore face off in this new weekly series, so that you are fully up to speed of who to watch for when once the season starts.

We will begin with the category of “Best Ski Jumpers” and today’s face-off on the men’s side firmly remains in Norway. Superstar Jarl Magnus Riiber vs. Shooting star and teammate Jens Lurås Oftebro.

It is a no-brainer to watch out for World Cup dominator Jarl Magnus Riiber also next season. The statistics of last winter also speak a clear language: Riiber won the Best Jumper Trophy with over 400 points and was clearly the best ski jumper of the field with 12 individual jumping round wins and the following pole positions in the race.

Two years his junior, teammate Jens Lurås Oftebro had his big breakthrough last season and even though he did not have the genius of Riiber on the jumping hill, he was always right behind him: two first, four second and three third places in individual jumping rounds give a good indication that the younger Oftebro brother is very much in his element on the jumping hill.

In a way, both athletes actually show some similarities, leaving Oftebro with the title of "Mini-Riiber" in some circles. Both are the younger brothers in families who are very active and invested in Nordic Combined. Both slight in build, strong on the jumping hill and with a rising capacity for fast cross-country racing.

A point to tip the scales event more for the upcoming winter might be Riiber’s training crash earlier this summer, which put him on the sidelines of jumping training for a few weeks and a very strong and solid-looking Jens Lurås Oftebro, who seems to have improved his cross-country performance to win the Norwegian championships on the large and normal hill against fast skiers like last year’s World Cup runner-up Jørgen Graabak.

It remains to be seen how Jarl Magnus Riiber will return to the hills and how both of the athletes use the last weeks before the season to be in optimal shape for the World Cup opener planned for Ruka (FIN) but both of them will be very worth to keep an eye on once the action resumes.