Simon Ammann and farewell to Oberstdorf

If everything goes as planned, a circle will come full on Wednesday. Then Simon Ammann will jump from the Schattenbergschanze for the last time in a competition at the start of the 70th Four Hills Tournament. On December 29, 1997, Ammann competed in his first of 461 World Cup competitions in Oberstdorf. It was a debut like a promise that was yet to be exceeded.

Ammann, 16 years old, high school student, 1 meter 60 tall and 42 kilograms, was the best Swiss fifteenth and qualified straight away for the Olympic Games in Nagano. “I just jumped and it worked,” he said at the time. The Austrian press saw him as the Swiss reply to the two-time Four Hills Tournament winner Andreas Goldberger because of his red cheeks and his lightheartedness.

The lens deal

24 years later, Simon Ammann has no special memories of his amazing World Cup debut, general images dominate: the old hill, the many spectators. But then another episode comes to mind with effects up to the present day. The “Blick” journalist asked him how far he had jumped, “I told him: ‘I don’t know, I can’t see what’s on the display without glasses.’” The owner of an optician’s shop in Buchs (SG) read the article, contacted Ammann, and offered his assistance. Ammann has been jumping with lenses ever since, and the optician’s business is still one of his partners today.

Ammann won twice in Oberstdorf in 2008 and 2013, probably his most emotional moments in the World Cup. He was never able to win the Four Hills Tournament, that’s the big gap in his Palmarès. Between 2007 and 2014 he finished the tour four times in the top three, twice second and twice third. Ammann’s relationship to the Four Hills Tournament has changed. In the past, the duel with the Austrians pushed him to the limit, and in the last few years he was based on the appreciation he felt in Oberstdorf or now even in Austria.

But sometimes he is almost embarrassed. Two years ago he met Karl Geiger in the knockout duel of the first round in Bischofshofen, Ammann landed after 121 meters, Geiger after 140 meters. «Great, Simi!», A spectator called after his jump. And Ammann asked himself: “Was he even watching?”

Bischofshofen and with it the Four Hills Tournament stand with the terrible fall in 2015 but also for the turning point in Ammann’s career. He did come back, but the earlier ease no longer came. Others would struggle with their fate, Ammann says seven years after the fall: “Bischofshofen was an exciting experience. I’ve learned something for life. ” He says that afterwards, before the competitions, the fear always flowed with the first training jump, “a rational fear”. When he returned to Bischofshofen in 2016, he finished eighth after mental parforce performance, and a week later, on ski flying in Bad Mitterndorf of all places, the fear of the first jump – «zack» – was gone forever.

In the spring of a year ago, Ammann announced in a communiqué that he was extending his career by two years, and he declared the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing to be his last major goal. But since then it has become quiet about the resignation. Ammann pretends that his presumably last season is an ordinary winter, he doesn’t even let thoughts of the imminent farewell arise, it should be as always, there is still so much to do and tinker with. He wants to be true to himself to the last. The trainers and supervisors play along, Martin Künzle, his long-time companion, says: “Resigning has never really been an issue between us.”

On Sunday a week ago Ammann failed in the qualification in Engelberg, a farewell couldn’t be much more bitter, he had won three times on the Titlisschanze. After that he gave no interviews, retired to the hotel and watched the jumping on TV, his one-year-old son Aaron slept next to him. Descending was a reaction that one is not used to from Ammann, after the disappointment at the Olympic Games in Sochi, for example, he shed tears for seven minutes in front of the journalists in front of the journalists, struggling for words. His refusal had nothing to do with the way Engelberg said goodbye, says Ammann. Rather, the reaction should show: I’m angry and won’t let my legs sag.

Because Ammann is in a precarious situation. Yet again. In retrospect, he describes the first half of last winter as “hair-raising and catastrophic”, but he just managed to get around the corner, but the jump remained unfinished. “I was never stress-free,” he said at the end of the 2021 World Cup in Oberstdorf.

Podium, then the setback

In the summer he wanted to close the gap that had opened up with the best, it looked good, in Courchevel he came third in the Summer Grand Prix and flew away from everyone. Had he landed properly, he would have won a summer GP competition for the first time in eleven years. Two weeks later he tore two ligaments in his right foot, the healing process dragged on, and Ammann has never started the season with so few training jumps.

The form is significantly better than a year ago, and hopefully Ammann also managed to make strong jumps here and there, for example in sixth place in the qualification of Klingenthal, but there is a lack of consistency. Sometimes he jumps too early, sometimes too late, sometimes he sits too high on the approach, sometimes too low. The trainer Künzle locates the problems with the transition to the flight phase, Ammann is not happy with his approach position. In Klingenthal he was twelfth in a turbulent competition after the first round, in the final he was unable to use the opportunity and fell back to 25th place. On that day he missed a big chance, he only made it to Beijing with a top 20 classification.

Six chances remain until the end of the selection phase on January 16. The vision of “Beijing 2022” carried the four-time Olympic champion through the last year and a half. Ammann speaks of the anticipation and that it is inspiring for him just to jump in a new place. This time he was unable to develop an emotional closeness to the Olympic site due to the pandemic, and Beijing must feel anemic to him.

Two and a half years before the Sochi Games, he took his Russian wife Yana on a summer excursion to the Olympic region, in the fall before the Pyeongchang Games Ammann flew to South Korea with national coach Ronny Hornschuh, trained on the Olympic hill, raved about wonderful autumn days in full color. And: “The soup was so red and hot that it burned away the jetlag.”

Two days after the diver in Engelberg, Ammann trained in Oberstdorf. Four jumps in the morning, five better jumps in the afternoon. It would be the perfect place to qualify for his seventh Olympic Games on Wednesday at the age of 40.