Many dreams of a German victory at the Four Hills Tournament in the snow of Innsbruck have ended on the Bergisel in Innsbruck. The mountain is considered the fate of the German ski jumpers, who actually like the hill. Meanwhile, a real tragedy puts all sporting annoyances into perspective.
Karl Geiger was completely served a year ago today: “At the moment I’m pretty pissed off and don’t expect anything from the overall standings. But I don’t care,” said the very level-headed man from the Allgäu a year ago in Innsbruck. With a disastrous first jump on January 4, 2021 on the Bergisel, he threw away any chance to follow in Sven Hannawald’s footsteps. He had won the Four Hills Tournament in 2002, which no German has been able to repeat since then. “That it’s like this again this year, you just puke. I’m sorry for the choice of words,” said Geiger frustrated at Eurosport. That is just “lousy bitter”.
In the end, the German still fought for a strong second place in the overall ranking of the 69th Four Hills Tournament, but in Innsbruck he had already lost the tour victory. “I first have to shut down the system a bit. At the moment I could really step in anywhere. I don’t really know myself like that. But it’s just emotional,” he said on ARD. The annoyance of the later double world champion was just another in the long series of German frustrations on the Olympic hill, which had been rebuilt and rebuilt several times, from 1964 and 1976.
Now the world’s ski jumping elite has gathered again on the slope with a view of the Innsbruck cemetery, which has since earned the reputation of being the “Germans’ mountain of fate”. What the Nanga Parbat is to the alpinist, the Bergisel is to the ski jumper. A look at the long history of jumping shows why.
Schmitt falls and loses the tour
In 1999 Martin Schmitt was at the height of his skills, the hype about the young German ski jumpers was slowly approaching the boiling point. Schmitt had traveled to the tour as the World Cup leader, and the then 20-year-old won in Oberstdorf and Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Later he defended his title as overall world cup winner, was world champion in individual from the big chance and with the team. In Innsbruck, however, everything went wrong: Instead of continuing the run, Schmitt crashed in difficult conditions in the qualification, in the competition it was only enough to finish 13th.
“I’m just a person and not a machine. You can’t do anything about that, I just couldn’t get on with the hill,” commented Schmitt at the time, and wrote off the overall victory: “I lost the tour, it no longer makes sense, if I attack again in Bischofshofen. ” The attack did not materialize: In Bischofshofen, the high-flyer landed in 14th place and slipped from third place in the tour evaluation.
Hannawald dominates and flies towards history
In 2002, Sven Hannawald fared very differently from Martin Schmitt in 1999 and Karl Geiger last year. On his way to sporting immortality, after his triumphs in Oberstdorf and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, he also won the jumping on the Bergisel – and two days later he was the first ever jumper to sail to the Grand Slam in Bischofshofen. Eighteen years after Jens Weißflog, who won for himself and the GDR in Austria in 1984, there was jubilation in black-red-gold for the first time.
The competition in Innsbruck, so it gushed out from Hannawald at the time, was “a really great bombshell. It’s sensational. I don’t get it at all. Despite all the nervous pressure, I manage phenomenal things.” In the first round he pulverized all the competition’s tender hopes with the hill record of 134.5 meters, and Hannawald left Innsbruck with the equivalent of 24 meters ahead of Adam Malysz, second overall. The rest is sports history.
Friday wins – and falls bitterly
After that, a golden era did not begin for the German jumpers in the narrow pocket of the Bergisel: After Hannawald’s miracle flights in 2002, it took another 13 years until the next DSV athlete was at the top. Richard Freitag won in 2015 as the last German to date. But the memories of Innsbruck are also badly clouded for Saxony: In 2018, the German hope for a tour victory was Friday, after the first two competitions, the gap to the leading Kamil Stoch was only 11.8 points.
The 26-year-old, now no longer part of the German touring team, was the overall World Cup leader and in great shape. But in the first round all dreams died within seconds: Friday landed at a strong 130 meters, but he fell and injured himself. The then national coach Werner Schuster said he was in “very severe pain”. Instead of the second round, Friday came to the hospital. The anger in the German camp was great: “It was definitely too much start-up. There is a technical delegate here who is pursuing a different strategy. It was extremely difficult,” said Schuster on ZDF. Friday did not start in Bischofshofen.
The former overall World Cup winner Severin Freund, who these days is fighting his way back to the top of the world after several serious injuries and was the best German in the qualification, was once on course “Tour victory” – until he came to Innsbruck. In 2016, Freund won in Oberstdorf, and in Garmisch-Partenkirchen he came third. Only eight points separated him in the overall standings from the leader Peter Prevc.
During the trial run on the Bergisel, Freund then hit the snow with his back and sustained a painful hip injury. He was able to finish the competition and finally the tour with pain, but in Innsbruck he lost eleven points to the eventual overall winner Prevc. “It was wonderful and was extremely fun – with a small moment of shock and a few wounds,” said Freund after his final second place in Bischofshofen with a small reference to his fall in Innsbruck.
“A blede pig”: Eisenbichler and the Bergisel
Markus Eisenbichler has his own eventful history on Innsbruck’s local mountain. After a strong New Year’s competition in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the Bavarian is fourth in the best placed German in the overall standings. “The Bergisel is a stupid pig every now and then,” said Eisenbichler in 2021 after his friend and roommate Geiger had sealed his touring fate. And Eisenbichler had already climbed into the car to Innsbruck once with the best prospects of at least one podium place: It was 2017, in the end he was a big loser in a wild wind lottery. The 112 meters from the first run were more of a hop, on rank 29 he just managed to get into the second run to be able to repair a little something.
“Woe, they break off,” he pleaded, but the jury was running out of time: Because there was no floodlight on the Bergisel even after the most recent renovation, after an eternal first round there was only one jump for everyone. Eisenbichler, who fell back to 6th overall, was to blame for the bad jump, but not with others: “I tend to be annoyed that I was a little too early at the table. My God, it was just windy. Sometimes it’s good “Sometimes it’s bad,” said Eisenbichler.
The second round in January 2019 also went really badly: Eisenbichler was the only one to defy the outstanding Ryoyu Kobayashi, 4.2 points separated the two after the first two tour competitions. But 123.5 meters were far too little after a passable first round, the Japanese jumped almost 15 meters further in the day’s standings.
It went better not even two months later in the same place: “I’m over the moon, I feel a lot of adrenaline, I’m shaking right now,” said Eisenbichler happily. “That was one of my hottest jumps ever. Now I’m world champion, I can’t believe it”, Eisenbichler cheered on February 23, 2019, a few minutes after he made himself world champion on the large hill on Bergisel – ahead of Geiger. “Both of them already showed in the qualification with places one and two that they can cope here,” said national coach Werner Schuster.
German hopes are intact
In the afternoon (from 1.30 p.m. / ZDF and in the live ticker on ntv.de) it starts again on the slope above Innsbruck. The Germans remained inconspicuous in qualifying: no falls, no flights. Geiger landed in 10th place, Eisenbichler in 8th place. Severin Freund, as the best German with a Bergisel past, came in sixth.
Because of the stressful history, the German ski jumping team had trained several times on the Bergisel in the summer. “We even took our scientists with us, set up cameras and adjusted our technology to the jump,” reported Horngacher. It obviously worked: Eisenbichler had made a dream jump in training before qualifying and had flown 139 meters. “Markus had a first-class jump in training. I think it was a nice day for him,” said Horngacher.
Eisenbichler likes the hill anyway: “Innsbruck is tricky, but a wonderful hill in good weather,” he said. He doesn’t want to look at the weather report again before jumping on the extremely wind-prone hill, where “bizarre things have often happened” (Horngacher). “For what? I can’t change it anyway. Should I then write an SMS to Petrus and say: You speci, can you make a little more sunshine?”
The winner of the tour seems to be certain: the Japanese Ryoyu Kobayashi jumps too strongly and too consistently. In the qualification, too, the winner from Oberstdorf and Garmisch-Partenkirchen flew away from everyone. But others have already lost the tour here. Perhaps the fate of Karl Geiger, who was last punished three times in the wind lottery, will turn for the better this time? In any case, a preliminary decision will be made today, at least statistically: The jumper who traveled as the leader from Innsbruck to Bischofshofen has won the overall ranking 23 times in the last 25 years.
The hope for the first German overall victory is still intact: “We are not throwing the gun in the grain and saying: Everything is shit. Kobayashi is extremely strong, but we have to stick with it and give everything that we are at the top in the end stand “, says national coach Horngacher. “I’m getting better and better – and I don’t care what Kobayashi does. On my second jump in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, I showed that I can easily keep up with him,” says Eisenbichler.
A real tragedy
But all of this is just sport, it’s about winning and losing, nothing more. Life and death have already been a matter of life and death at the Bergisel, the “Bergisel tragedy” has burned itself into the collective memory of not only Tyrol in a terrible way. On December 4, 1999, eleven months after Martin Schmitt jumped a long way behind and only one month before the tour returned to Innsbruck, a snowboard event in the Bergisel Stadium, which was at least filled to the roof, and perhaps overcrowded, came to a point , in which real fate struck really mercilessly: five girls lost their lives when leaving the cauldron, two other young women died years later from their serious injuries. Another 38 people were injured, some seriously, and four are still dependent on care. They were crushed and rolled over by a human roller that made its way out of the stadium at the west exit.
“Police officers had to fire warning shots to clear the way for paramedics to reach the victims and to prevent paramedics themselves from being trampled,” wrote the ORF. No culprit was found for the drama, and various trials ultimately led to acquittals.