Poland held its breath. Stoch collapsed and panic began. Televisions made a special edition

On February 12, 2014, it could change the history of Polish ski jumping. On that day, the team members got to know the K-125 hill in Sochi. There were three trainings planned, but Poland held its breath already during the second round.

It was just before 10 pm Polish time. – Kamil was the last to jump. Immediately upon landing, one ski knocked down, it beat the other, both skidded to the side and the jumper fell over. He wasn’t moving. Immediately, medical staff and a Polish physiotherapist £ ukasz Gêbala, who is always downstairs, handed over the warmers to the jumpers, ran up to him. After a longer moment, lasting about three minutes, Stoch got up and left the ski jumping hill with escort –

Special issue on TV. The whole country trembled for Stoch

Three days earlier he won the gold medal on the K95 hill in great style and became the second Polish jumper in history to win the Olympics. In such circumstances, the whole country followed the training series. However, no television broadcast them, so information about the collapse spread the fastest on Twitter, who was fledgling in Poland. Soon after, information became number one of all news sites. TVN24 and TVP Info prepared special editions, it was considered whether Stoch would be able to participate in the competition. Experts were contacted and conversations with Sochi were shown.

The fall looked dangerous. The Pole patted his left hand, letting the rescuers know that something was wrong. After a while, they put a sling on him. – Okay, just broken, but it’s nothing. It turned me onto my stomach, I was scrubbing my mouth after jumping down. At first I checked if I had all the teeth. Fortunately, they are, said Stoch, who was to undergo a thorough examination that night.

The fans and the media were waiting for them as if they were sentenced, but the doctor of the Polish team, Aleksander Winiarski, told TVN24 that the X-ray examination showed no fractures. This was also confirmed by the morning communiqué of the Polish Olympic Committee. – “After a menacing-looking fall after the second training jump on a large hill, Kamil Stoch suffered a sprain of the left elbow joint with bruises. The X-ray examination carried out at night in the polyclinic of the Olympic Mountain Village did not show any bone changes in the patient, which means that there were no fractures, it was written.

Powdery snow causes the fall

All the jumpers emphasized that there was a big problem with snow at the Olympics in Sochi. As now in Beijing and Zhangjiakou, snow had to be produced artificially, although in Russia there was also a problem with high temperatures. That is why the snow produced there resembled ice crystals. So the white powder had a loose consistency and the organizers did not manage to pack the hill properly. The jumpers emphasized that if the jumper were to stand on the landing hill not on skis, but on ordinary boots, his leg would collapse by several centimeters. It also caused landing problems, because the Russian Mikhail Maksimochkin also fell on the same day.

– The reason for the fall was my landing in a bad style. But also snow conditions on the landing hill. It was very soft on the landing hill and this snow did not help me to save myself from falling. The fact that I came out without injury is due to instincts, because we don’t learn to fall. It was uneven than the jumps of others, the snow turned like sugar, it was difficult to put the skis away, explained Kamil Stoch.

– He did the best he could do: a controlled fall. Fortunately, it’s just elbows. Kamil has such falls every six months. For a jumper, the worst are injuries from the waist down – the then coach added in an interview with Sport.pl

Stoch was angry at the unleashed scandal. Father pleaded for peace

The topic of Stoch’s downfall was on the top of websites and television. – It’s time to appeal to all media to treat all interviews with moderation. I spoke to my son the day before and he could barely speak. He was hoarse and exhausted. Keep in mind that these are people in advanced work, appealed Bronis³aw Stoch, Kamil’s father, in a special issue of TVP Info. – Later, only Kamil was nervous that such a scandal had broken out, said Ewa Bilan Stoch in 2014.

It turned out that the fall of Stoch did not stop him, and three days later the Pole won the second gold medal at the Sochi Olympics. The jumper defeated and, although he himself admitted that his jump in the second round was probably the worst he had ever managed to win any competition.