Granerud wins qualification in Engelberg

Halvor Egner Granerud won the first qualification for the FIS Ski Jumping World Cup in Engelberg (SUI) on Friday.
Granerud jumped to a qualifying best of 136.5 metres on the HS 140 metres hill in Engelberg, beating Austria's Stefan Kraft and Dawid Kubacki from Poland.

"The jump today in the qualification was really good, I hope that I can continue the level of today in the competition tomorrow," explained Granerud, who always jumps at a very high level, but still lacks consistency to land permanently at the top.
Anze Lanisek (SLO), Manuel Fettner (AUT) and Ziga Jelar (SLO) came in 4th - 6th, Pius Paschke was the best DSV athlete in 7th place, directly ahead of Ryoyu Kobayashi who is slowly but surely finding his best form again, the Four Hills Tournament starts in Oberstdorf in about 10 days, Kobayashi should be one of the top favourites by then.
With Jan Hörl, Michael Hayböck, Markus Müller and Daniel Tschofenig in 9th, 10th, 12th and 13th place, the ÖSV Eagles once again demonstrated their current team strength.
Stephan Leyhe (16), Constantin Schmid (17), Andreas Wellinger (22), Karl Geiger (29) and Markus Eisenbichler (33) easily qualified for the competition, but there was no top performance to be seen from the DSV stars.

Simon Ammann without a chance
Local hero and four-time Olympic champion Simon Ammann narrowly missed out on the top 50 in 51st place at his first World Cup start this winter. Ammann had only completed a handful of training jumps during the entire summer due to studies and building a house. 
Ammann's teammates Kilian Peier and Dominik Peter narrowly reached the competition in 48th and 50th place, Gregor Deschwanden finished 23rd as the best Swiss. "Today it was a difficult qualification, my jump was good, it was a step forward for me personally," Deschwanden summed up his day of work.

The first of two competitions in Engelberg starts on Saturday at 16:00, the second competition follows on Sunday already at 12:30.