Third league instead of top class: The deep fall of the world champion Friday

Third league instead of extra class
The very deep fall of the world champion Friday

It’s been four years since Richard Freitag won three World Cups at the start of the ski jumping season. The national coach doesn’t even know his shape anymore. The 31-year-old indicates a career end if the third-class FIS Cup remains at its maximum.

The other day was another one of those days when everything must have seemed terribly pointless to Richard Friday. Falun / Sweden, a competition of the FIS Cup, third division of ski jumping. Hardly any spectators, even less flair, a playground for talents. And Friday, who four years ago was the best German jumper and 2019 team world champion, landed in 26th place. The former high-class flyer is in a dead end. And the end of your career is increasingly emerging as the only way out.

“If I don’t make the step by next January, February …” Friday recently told the “Sächsische Zeitung” without finishing the sentence. Nevertheless, the message was clear: The 31-year-old Saxon no longer wants to hopelessly jump after any teenagers, wants to go back to the World Cup, where his younger sister Selina jumps among women. And: Olympia would be a goal. But the simple truth is: This winter it will never work.

“The motivation is not getting any easier,” says Freitag. While Markus Eisenbichler, Karl Geiger and Stephan Leyhe, his colleagues from the Innsbruck world championship team, appear on the big stage again at the weekend in Kuusamo, Friday’s perspective is the tour through lower-class competition series. “He just lacks the last kick,” says national coach Stefan Horngacher, and then mercilessly depicts Friday’s fall into insignificance in one sentence: “I can’t really judge that because I haven’t trained with him for a long time.” The seven-time World Cup winner is currently not in the system.

“Ski jumping is extremely top-heavy”

But what does Friday have to offer? Last year he was allowed to run over the extended squad at the Four Hills Tournament in Oberstdorf and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, finished 41st and 27th, and missed the Oberstdorf home World Cup. In the second-class Continental Cup he jumped once into the top ten, at the DM in October 17th. It cannot be ruled out that the upcoming tour will not even reach the national group at the start. Only Marinus Kraus, the almost forgotten team Olympic champion from 2014, who has been fighting in vain for a World Cup for six years, has actually fallen lower.

But what ruined Friday? “Ski jumping is extremely top-heavy and looseness is the highest art. That’s the crux of the matter,” he says. Freitag is a brooder, a sensitive athlete, the complete alternative to the laid-back entertainer Eisenbichler.

In his best winter – 2017/18 – Friday won three of the first seven competitions, was the face of the DSV-Adler with his distinctive mustache and was brilliantly in the title race at halftime on the tour. Then he fell in Innsbruck and had to give up injured. With a show of strength he was fit for the following World Cup in Oberstdorf, won bronze and a little later the Olympic team silver. Even though Friday celebrated his greatest success with the world championship title a year later – all of this has probably left deeper marks.

“I know how it is when you play up there. The sport is very tough, you need the strength for yourself,” says Freitag. At the moment he doesn’t seem like he can muster that strength again.

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