Polish team unbeatable in front of the home crowd
Aug 31, 2018·Ski Jumping
Sold-out arena for the opening event of the FIS Grand Prix in Wisla (POL). In front of 10 000 enthusiastic fans at the Adam-Malysz-hill in Wisla, the Polish Ski Jumping team (Maciej Kot, Dawid Kubacki, Piotr Zyla and Kamil Stoch) took a clear win in this summer's first competition ahead of Germany (Karl Geiger, Stephan Leyhe, Richard Freitag and Andreas Wellinger) and Norway.
The best jumper of the day, Piotr Zyla, was obviously satisfied with this performance: "I have been jumping well since the beginning of this preparation period and I did my best today. It was new to jump as the last one of the team. I was a bit nervous after the first round. In the final, our lead was big enough so I could relax."
With a total of 1073.3 points after the final jumper, the Polish team had a remarkable lead of 71.3 points over Germany. "We are happy about the second place. The atmosphere is great here every year. We are planning to jump in every competition until Einsiedeln, and then we will see", Karl Geiger said after the competition.
The Norwegians (Halvor Egner Granerud, Marius Lindvik, Robert Johansson and Johann Andre Forfang) fought hard for the second place until the end but came in 3.9 points behind the German team. "All of the guys can do a little bit better, but we are on the podium and we are happy with the result. It is always a pleasure to jump in Wisla. We’ve been here for a training camp since Monday. We do not know if we are competing in every summer competition. It is an individual decision for every jumper", said Johann Andre Forfang.
The young Slovenian team had a successful start of the summer with the fourth place, the team of Japan, with the new head coach Hideharu Miyahira, also showed a strong performance and finished fifth.
For the athletes of Austria and their new coach Andreas Felder, this first competition didn't go that well. The four Austrians (Stefan Kraft, Gregor Schlierenzauer, Michael Hayboeck and Andreas Kofler) came in only sixth, close behind Japan.
Switzerland achieved a good result in seventh, the Czech Republic followed in eight.
The second competition of the summer, an individual event, starts on Sunday at 5:30 pm CET.
)
