The picture is known to ski jumping travelers. In the morning you step outside the door, look up, listen and know: this is going to be a difficult day. The flags in front of the hotel flutter like an exhaust pipe, the wind rushes around the houses. Everything is in motion in the firmament, the hairstyles of the first passers-by are wildly disheveled, as are the clouds above. Sure, the Four Hills Tournament has arrived in Innsbruck.
As is often the case, the weather has now stolen the show from the ski jumpers. Instead, the organizers got into motion, who had to manage the situation for hours, although it became increasingly clear that the third competition of the Four Hills Tournament, as in 2008, cannot take place because of the foehn. In the afternoon at 3 p.m., race director Sandro Pertile finally announced a decision: The 2022 Bergisel competition will be canceled, at least in its normal form.
This time only as a photographer: Severin Freund documents the foehn storm at the Bergisel ski jump in Innsbruck.
(Photo: Ulrich Wagner / imago)
Instead, the third station will be relocated to Bischofshofen. The Innsbruck edition is to be held there on Wednesday, followed by the planned Bischofshofener Four Hills final on Thursday. Trial rounds, qualification and jumping (knockout round and final) are possible on one day each.
To make matters worse: the Innsbrucker Schanze has no floodlights yet
“You have to try everything right up to the last minute,” explained Pertile, which meant that the entire team of jumpers remained trapped for a day until 3pm in the afternoon. For example, while the weather service at Kranebitten Airport was already forecasting the peaks of the storm wind at 4 p.m., the competition jury still opted for one last alternative: a final competition at 3 p.m., but then only with one round. Because – this is also a specialty of Innsbruck – the Bergisel ski jump does not yet have floodlights. And even if this has already been decided by the city and country for no later than 2024, it was definitely dark on the Bergisel this Tuesday from four in the afternoon.
The jumpers themselves found all of this less funny. Austria’s three-time world champion Stefan Kraft said on Austrian television that he trusts his trainer and that he would jump if he waved him into the lane while sitting upstairs. But I don’t think that “a fair jumping will take place today”, he added. He was sometimes difficult to understand because the microphone he was speaking into was buzzing in the wind, while in the background the wind nets of the ski jump billowed out like the spinnaker at a sailing race.
And now everyone together had time to surf the Internet, although it almost made itself felt to google the hair dryer. The exact causes of this weather phenomenon are unknown, nor are the reasons why it hits Innsbruck so often, albeit in a lighter form. The architecturally unique ski jump with the ingeniously twisted upper end, which reminds some locals of a cobra, is enthroned on a 746 meter high hill in an area that is particularly prone to foehn. Innsbruck’s atmospheric researcher Alexander Gohm once revealed to the sport.tirol portal that it has a topography that couldn’t be better created for the downwind. Foehn arises accordingly in many areas, but almost nowhere as good as above the Bergiselschanze.
The Bergisel is actually not a place where a ski jump should be built
It all begins on the Brenner Pass, around 50 kilometers to the south, one of the lowest crossings over the main Alpine ridge. Here the air masses from the south can easily rise to the north, and when they are over the pass, the foehn wind slowly develops. Because the air sinks again, compresses and warms up and then falls faster and faster than a stiff breeze, directly in the direction of the cobra, which has appropriately turned its head downhill. So if there is one mountain on which you shouldn’t build a ski jump, it’s the Bergisel.
Nevertheless, nobody is happy after the cancellation, because Innsbruck was always a highlight of the ski jumping winter even in times of the pandemic. Nobody wants to miss this hill, which writes special stories. In addition to the unpredictable wind, the facility is also something special in the jumping circuit because of its narrowness. The inrun lane is shorter, as is the radius of the hill before the jump, the flight phase, all of this requires technical ability. For a long time, the organizers had resisted a rejection, probably also to make sure that the cancellation insurance remains in place because they have tried everything.
So now it’s off to Pongau in the south of Salzburg, to Bischofshofen, where the rest of the Four Hills Tournament will be held – although the name is no longer true. But what could you call the series? As a three-hill tournament? But that led astray, because there should still be four competitions. The 2022 edition could therefore go down in winter sports history as a three-hill four-jumping tournament – provided that the wind in Bischofshofen plays along.