Something was at stake. The team mood, for example, which is latently strained in the German combined athletes because more than four runners are running for the four relay places. Nothing less than gold was possible in this season, as well as a fabulous record, the replacement of one of the greatest Nordic cracks – Björn Dählie – in the World Championship medal ranking. Above all, however, it was about this success in this race over the large hill and long distance.
But because athletes tend not to forego a medal, for example because they already have enough, there was a risk of trouble after a normal race line-up, which is why Hermann Weinbuch, the long-serving national trainer of Nordic combined, went new ways. Instead of his coaching instincts, he trusted science. He had each of his World Championship riders check their strengths on the local Planica cross-country ski run and on the large hill, many statistics were used, current parameters were compared and formatted, added up and cast into a point value. In short, Manuel Faißt (3.1 and 3.7 points) was out, Eric Frenzel and Johannes Rydzek got more and were there; Julian Schmid and Vinzenz Geiger were set anyway.
They end up digging through the snow, about to knock each other over
This is unsatisfactory for the person concerned, but Weinbuch had a good argument: What else could one do? And finally, the sensitivity of Weinbuch’s formula brought the desired result. The German relay team won silver on Wednesday, behind the Norwegians, whose top runner Jarl Magnus Riiber had to push his limits in the sprint to keep Weinbuch’s goalkeeper Julian Schmid at bay. Third was Johannes Lamparter from Austria, overall it was a competition that revealed everything that makes up the combination: technical skills in the air and on the cross-country ski run, changing leads and a final lap that offered everything, provocative walking pace and at the end a furious long sprint .
Such a combination day is long, with preliminary discussions, test jumps, competition flights and then a pursuit relay. With the women’s division being introduced far too late, this sport can use any exciting performance as an argument before the skeptical Olympic programmers, and this Wednesday had it all in store. A kind of catch-up race had already started in the jumping. Riiber, the top Nordic combined athlete who was still suffering from severe stomach problems in February, had long since recovered, and here too he was unsurpassed in jumping. He had covered 139 meters before he touched down, all the following Germans, Austrians and Finns could not catch up – until Julian Schmid was the last jumper at noon. He flew high and far, had a lot of speed and came close to Riiber’s mark. At 137 meters, he reduced the deficit at the start of the cross-country pursuer from 34 to 23 seconds.
Up until then, the Formula method had worked. But did it calculate all turns and opponent actions in a race? Suddenly gold was possible again, but everything depended on Frenzel and Rydzek, who had to find the strength for a five-kilometer race again. It quickly became clear: Frenzel still had the strength, and so did Rydzek in the third season round. The first had closed the gap to Norway at the start, giving his teammates a restart, and Rydzek later held the pace before the crucial last lap.
It was a walk at first. Riiber and Schmid, the respective last runners, watched each other, they twitched here and braked there again until the rest of the field threatened to run aground, which they probably didn’t care. At the end, when there was still an estimated half a kilometer ahead of them, the actual final sprint began. Riiber pulled up and Schmid hung in his slipstream, the two dug through the snow and were about to knock each other over. Finally, the situation in which Schmid pushed into a gap on the inside of a curve – and was slowed down by Riiber – was borderline.
The national coach thinks that “a limit has been crossed”.
“It was on the verge of being unsportsmanlike, that should be investigated,” said Weinbuch later, whose protest, to his incomprehension, was dismissed by the race director: “We want a fight, but we want a fair fight, in our opinion a limit has been crossed .”
After that, the man from Oberstdorf lost the connection, Riiber skated up and away, Schmid took silver ahead of Austrian Lamparter, and Schmid’s teammate Eric Frenzel also won something. With this second place and his 18th medal at a World Championships, he actually replaces Björn Dählie as the best athlete by medals at Nordic World Championships.