Stefan Kraft outstanding in the qualification

Stefan Kraft, last season's overall World Cup champion, also won the qualification for this season's second individual competition with an outstanding jump of 144 m and 151.8 points. The Austrian was also the best in the qualification for the World Cup opener a week ago in Wisla.

The second place went to Norway's Johann Andre Forfang with 138.5 m and 144.1 points. He was followed by Richard Freitag of Germany, who scored 129.9 points with his jump of 138 m.

Behind Michael Hayboeck of Austria, Junshiro Kobayashi, who took his first ever win in the World Cup last Sunday, confirmed his currently great shape in fifth.

Swiss Simon Ammann showed a convincing performance and came in sixth, followed by Germany's Andreas Wellinger (7th) and the surprisingly strong Italian Davide Bresadola (8th).

The two best ski jumpers of the Polish team in this qualification were Kamil Stoch and Dawid Kubacki in ninth and tenth. The strong result of the German team was completed by Markus Eisenbichler and Pius Paschke in 11th and 12th.

The hosts from Finland will be represented by four athletes in the individual competition on the Rukatunturi-hill: Antti Aalto, Janne Ahonen, Lauri Asikainen and Janne Korhonen made the cut for the Top 50. But the team will have to do without head coach Andreas Mitter this weekend. The Austrian became a father again and returned back home.

Canada's Mackenzie Boyd-Clowes and Will Rhoads and Michael Glasder of the USA, who skipped the season opener in Wisla to train in Finland instead, also successfully qualified for the competition here.

Some athletes became victims of the difficult wind conditions, that already caused various delays during the official training. Daniel Huber, David Siegel, Roman Koudelka, Kevin Bickner, Noriaki Kasai, Anders Fannemel and Jurij Tepes will not be able to compete on Sunday. T

he team competition in Ruka will take place on Saturday (4:15 pm CET), the individual competition follows on Sunday afternoon at 3 pm CET.