The seasonal ride on the emotional roller coaster ends with a big high for Sara Marita Kramer. A good month after a ski jumping world collapsed for the high-flyer when she missed the Olympic Games due to corona, she prematurely secured the title of best ski jumper of the 2021/22 season in Oberhof on Saturday. The 20-year-old from Salzburg is the overall World Cup winner for the first time.
Seven years after Daniela Iraschko-Stolz, Kramer caught up on what was overdue. After bankruptcies, bad luck and breakdowns, everything went perfectly for the perfectionist in the sum of a whole season – in her 17 individual competitions she was on the podium eleven times, seven of them at the top. Last year’s third overall already has 15 World Cup victories to show for it. For comparison: Despite her young age, Kramer is only one success away from the Austrian record of 18 years older Iraschko pride. Missed the Olympics The triumph was balm for a young, recently battered athlete’s soul. When she missed the Olympics in Beijing in February, the Dutch-Austrian dual citizen fell into a lack of motivation, the ski jumping skis ended up in the corner for days. No wonder, it was already the third massive sporting setback. At the end of March she missed the overall victory in the World Cup by only eleven points, in a heart-stopping final she was distanced by the Slovenian Nika Kriznar and the Japanese Sara Takanashi. The decision in the three-way battle had been made around five weeks earlier at the World Cup in Rasnov, when Kramer was not allowed to compete after a suspected false positive corona test. At the following World Championships in Oberstdorf, a jury lapse from the normal hill caused “Blech” and from the large hill nerves for another fourth place. Not satisfied with first place either is always satisfied with itself and, from the top step of the victory podium, criticizes what, in its opinion, is not the best quality. Kramer is characterized by this attitude, but it also makes the “defeats” through no fault of his own all the more painful. “I hope that I’ll be lucky at some point. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case in recent years,” Kramer said in a recent media interview. On Sunday she finally crossed the threshold of happiness.
source site-12