German team wins nail-biter ahead of Slovenia
Feb 29, 2020·Ski Jumping
Excitement until the very last jump: The German ski jumpers won the World Cup in Lahti (FIN) on Saturday evening. Constantin Schmid, Pius Paschke, Stephan Leyhe and Karl Geiger scored 984.1 points in the team competition and came just ahead of the teams of Slovenia and Austria.
In again very good weather conditions, Slovenia, with Cene Prevc, Timi Zajc, Peter Prevc and Anze Lanisek, fought with the Germans until the final jump. In the end, the Slovenes were only 2.3 points behind the winners. The third-placed team of Austria was only 2.5 points behind Slovenia. Today's competition was not decided until the jumps of the fourth athletes of each of the top teams.
"I think it was a very good competition, especially in the first round we all jumped well. In the second round, I had a big mistake and a bad jump, so from my personal perspective, the competition was not that good. But the entire team did very well and we managed to win, so we are very happy", explained youngster Constantin Schmid. 20-year-old Schmid has become an indispensable member of the German team during the course of this winter.
The success in Lahti was the 15th win for Germany in a World Cup team event, only Austria (30) and Norway (25) have won more often, Finland also finished on top 15 times.
The best athlete of the Slovenian team was Timi Zajc, who posted the longest jump of the day with 130 m. "If somebody would have told us before today's competition that we would be second, we would have been really happy. Now it's a bit disappointing because we were fighting for the first place. But in the end, I think that tomorrow we will be happy about this result. The final round today, when I was waiting for the other guys to jump, felt like the longest round ever to me", said Cene Prevc.
Stefan Huber was surprisingly on the Austrian team today after he had achieved the first Top 10 finish of his career in eighth on Friday. Head coach Andi Felder chose him for the team over Gregor Schlierenzauer, Jan Hoerl or his brother Daniel. "I'm super happy about the podium today and also about yesterday's competition, of course. It was a really close fight today until the very last jumper. I'm happy we made it to the podium and it was a good day. Tomorrow I'll try to show my best jumps again and then we'll see", Stefan Huber told after the competition.
More than 20 points behind Austria, Norway came in fourth, Japan was fifth. The team of Poland was only sixth today and Piotr Zyla, Jakub Wolny, Kamil Stoch, and Dawid Kubacki seemed clueless after the competition. Nobody seemed to know what went wrong on Saturday in Lahti.
Switzerland finished seventh, the home team of Finland was eighth and it can be considered a success that they were able to come in ahead of Russia and earn their place in the final round of the best eight teams.
The third and final competition of the weekend in Lahti, another individual event, starts on Sunday at 3:30 pm CET (4:30 pm LOC). This will be the 1000th individual World Cup in history.
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