Ito takes the day, Takanashi the title

Great day for the Japanese Ski Jumping ladies in Pyeongchang (KOR): While Yuki Ito won the first competition of the FIS World Cup on the new Olympic hill, teammate Sara Takanashi came in 2nd and made her 4th victory in the overall World Cup perfect. The third place of the day went to Ema Klinec of Slovenia. While top athletes from Germany, Austria and several other nations did not take the trip to Korea but stayed home for training for the World Championships, Yuki Ito celebrated her 4th victory of the season with jumps to 96,0 and 101,5 meters and 234,4 points.

Clear win for Ito
That gave her a 9,5 point advantage over Sara Takanashi who was still in the lead after the first round. Ito said afterwards: “My first jump was actually pretty good technically, in the second round I was a bit late at the take-off, but I had good conditions. I got a good feeling for this hill, but this won't be enough to win here also at the Olympics next year.” For Takanashi 97,5 and 94,0 meters still were enough for the 2nd place and an uncatchable advantage over Ito in the overall World Cup. She said: “It's really nice that the overall World Cup was already decided today. In the first round I had a good jump, in the second round I was late at the take-off. The wind conditions were okay for me, I had no problems.“

Klinec with second podium
Junior-Vice-World Champion Ema Klinec took her second podium of the season with 100,0 and 96,0 meters and 218,7 points. Klinec said: “I'm really satisfied with this result. I did jump well here, also in the training. It was a difficult competition, so I had to remain focused until the end and I could come in third. I think I had bad wind in the first round right already after the take-off, so I had to work really hard in the air to jump far. Tomorrow I want to jump even better and hopefully the wind will be better as well.“

Difficult wind in Korea
In partly difficult wind conditions Norway´s Maren Lundby threw away her chances of still catching up with Sara Takanashi already in the first round with a jump of 90,0 meters. 99,0 meters in the final and 215,8 points brought her a 4th place. Germany´s Ramona Straub, after the longest jump of the day to 103,0 meters in the first round still third, missed out on her first World Cup podium by 8,2 points behind Ema Klinec and came in 5th. Yuka Seto, with 208,5 points on 6th position and Kaori Iwabuchi on 9th place delivered an almost perfect team result for Japan with four athletes in the top ten.

Season best for Englund and Kykkaenen
Nita Englund of the United States on 7th place and Finland´s Julia Kykkaenen on 8th place where happy about their best results of the season. Gianina Ernst came in 10th, her first top ten result since 2013. Slovenia´s Maja Vtic missed out on the top ten mainly because of bad landings and came in 11th ahead of Abby Ringquist and teammate Ursa Bogataj. Ksenia Kablukova finished 14th and was best Russian ahead of the four Germans Agnes Reisch, Juliane Seyfarth, Luisa Goerlich and Pauline Hessler and Oceane Avocat Gros of France. Natasha Bodnarchuk was best Canadian on 22nd place.

Point for Korean hosts
Guy-Lim Park secured an important World Cup point for Korea on 30th place. With only two competitions to come, tomorrow in Pyeongchang and after the World Championships in Oslo, Sara Takanashi has 1275 points in the World Cup ranking. That gives her an uncatchable advantage of 247 points over Yuki Ito and 286 points over Maren Lundby in third place. It is the 4th overall victory in the World Cup for Sara Takanashi after 2013, 2014 and 2016.

The second competitions of the ladies in Pyeongchang will start on Thursday at 7.45 am (CET).