Outstanding performance by Kobayashi & Co.
Aug 24, 2019·Ski Jumping
Same place, same dominance and (almost) the same result as yesterday. The Japanese ski jumpers are currently dominating the Grand Prix. Ryoyu Kobayashi also won the second FIS Grand Prix competition in Hakuba with jumps of 136 m and 129.5 m and 315.5 points, followed by his teammates Keiichi Sato (286.6 points) and Yukiya Sato (281.3 points).
Six Japanese among the best seven, this is the result of day 2 in Hakuba. Russia's Evgeniy Klimov was the only one who could keep up with the athletes of Japan. And Ryoyu Kobayashi is the outstanding athlete on the strong Japanese team.
"The way Ryoyu jumps is incredibly impressive. Every part of his jump could be in a textbook about Ski Jumping, it's all that good. Everyone of us can learn so much from Ryoyu Kobayashi right now", Norway's Robin Pedersen, who finished eleventh today, said representative of the entire field.
Today, Ryoyu Kobayashi set a hill record (136 m) in the first round and finished with a lead of about 30 points over second-placed Keiichi Sato. "I was nervous today, as I was yesterday, but it was a very good kind of nervous. I'm really happy about the record-jump with a good telemark in the first round. This makes me just as happy as the fact that we could sweep the podium on both days", Kobayashi said after his fourth win in a row in Hakuba.
Keiichi Sato, Yukiya Sato, Junshiro Kobayashi, Evgeniy Klimov, Daiki Ito and Naoki Nakamura finished on the places two to seven. Slowly but surely, only Japanese lessons will be required to pronounce the Top 10 in the Grand Prix correctly. Of course, this will change again in the final two events in Hinzenbach (AUT) and Klingenthal (GER), late September, early October, when all the top jumpers will be competing again, but these Japanese are really strong.
"Yesterday I was not truly happy about being on the podium, today I'm so happy that I earned this result with my performance. It's great to be on the podium with my teammates. My next goal is to be on the World Cup team constantly", explained youngster Keiichi Sato, who was on the podium yesterday due to the disqualification of Russia's Evgeniy Klimov.
With his third place today, Yukiya Sato now took the yellow bib in the overall ranking of the Grand Prix. With 244 points he leads ahead of Slovenia's Timi Zajc (236 points) and Naoki Nakamura (225 points).
Klemens Muranka and Andrzej Stekala finished eighth and ninth and achieved Top 10 results for Poland, Mikhail Nazarov of Russia was tenth.
Pius Paschke was eighth after the first round, but in the final, he lost a lot of ground and came in only 23rd. Martin Hamann failed to make the cut for the final round again.
Kevin Bickner was 13th, Mackenzie Boyd-Clowes 28th and Casey Larson also scored points in 29th. A strong result for the North Americans.
The result of the Austrian team was also remarkable today but in a negative way. Two (Claudio Moerth and Stefan Rainer) of the three athletes were disqualified, the third (Maximilian Lienher) was 39th and last. This doesn't happen every day for a Ski Jumping nation like Austria.
