Fabian Rießle sets 7th career victory in Trondheim

The German team has the amazing feature to always have one athlete to fill the gap if some of the other team members have a bad day. One day after Eric Frenzel’s triumph, it was Fabian Rießle who stepped it up and crowned himself the winner in Trondheim today. He faced fierce opposition from Norwegian Jarl Riiber, who was Rießle’s equal on the last steep uphill but had to concede defeat by 1.2 seconds at the finish line.

Finland’s Eero Hirvonen captured his fifth podium position with rank three, for Rießle it was the seventh career victory and Riiber drove his podium statistics to nine.

A Japanese was on top after the jumping event but it was not team leader Akito Watabe but Go Yamamoto, who captured the jumping win with 133 metres and 126.6 points. Norwegian jumping prodigy Jarl Riiber followed 12 seconds behind Yamamoto after his 137.5 metre jump in very good wind conditions that gave him slightly lower judges’ scores.

Franz-Josef Rehrl was third with 131.5 metres, starting 18 seconds behind Yamamoto. Akito Watabe started his race from position five with a delay of 36 seconds but had a time gap to his overall World Cup pursuer, Jan Schmid. Again, Schmid did not have the best jump and landed at 125.5 metres already. This meant a starting time of +1:01. Close to Schmid but with promising positions due to their cross-country abilities were local hero Magnus Krog and yesterday’s third placed Fabian Rießle. They started at +0:51 and +0:58.

In the last race of his career, American Bryan Fletcher jumped well again and started from position twelve, at the same time as Jan Schmid and was suddenly back to being fully in the fray for the top positions today. Yesterday’s winner Eric Frenzel was disqualified due to an irregular suit and teammate Johannes Rydzek was furious with a weaker jump of 121.5 metres and a time disadvantage of one minutes and 50 seconds.

For the first 1.5 laps of the race, Go Yamamoto and Jarl Riiber were a leading duo until that duo was joined by Akito Watabe and Franz-Josef Rehrl at the 4 km point of the race. By that time, the advantage of the leading foursome had shrunken to 14 seconds already and so it was clear that the cards would be reshuffled in the rest of the race.

At the halfway point, Jan Schmid set an attack and tried to lead the pursuing group that also consisted of Fabian Rießle, Bryan Fletcher, Willi Denifl, Magnus Krog, Eero Hirvonen, Mario Seidl and Lukas Greiderer closer to the leading four and his adversary Akito Watabe. One lap later, the gap was only five seconds and when the athletes came into the stadium the next time, Watabe was followed by Rießle and Riiber while the rest of the group was eight seconds behind.

Going into the last uphill, Rießle tried to attack but was counterattacked by Jarl Riiber and the young Norwegian impressively won the “uphill battle”. Rießle proved to be the stronger man in a finish line sprint but Riiber claimed a strong second place, an impressive comeback from not even having started the race yesterday.

Behind the two, Eero Hirvonen took his heart into his hands and skied for the podium, finishing 1.8 seconds after the number one and two. The rest of the group fell back to an 11-second gap with Magnus Krog claiming the unlucky fourth place, Akito Watabe taking the fifth position, Willi Denifl on rank sixth and Bryan Fletcher ended his career on a high note - the seventh place. The rest of the Top Ten positions were taken by Mario Seidl, Björn Kircheisen and Go Yamamoto.

The three fastest skiers, Ilkka Herola, Alessandro Pittin and Johannes Rydek ended up on positions 12, 13 and 11. After his strong attack at halfway point, Schmid seemed to have run out of steam and fell back to position fifteen.