After Piotr ¯y³a’s third place in Friday’s individual competition, Polish jumpers wanted to fight for the podium in Saturday’s team competition. And in the first round, they signaled that they could do it. The Poles jumped steadily and reliably. Piotr Żyła jumped 124, Paweł Wąsek 121, Dawid Kubacki 120.5, and Kamil Stoch 121 meters.
Thanks to these jumps, Poland was fifth at the halfway point of the competition, but only 3.4 points behind Norway’s third. After the first round, it was expected that the Austrians and the Slovenes would fight for the win, they had an advantage of about 20 points over the rest of the stake. After four jumps, Slovenia was in the lead by just 0.6 points.
Kraft gives the Austrians a victory in Lahti. Narrow’s disqualification plunged the Poles
In the second series, the Poles were heading for the fifth place. Piotr Żyła jumped 121 meters and Paweł Wąsek only one meter shorter. Unfortunately, it soon turned out that Wąsek was disqualified for unregulated shoes. This decision made the Polish national team fall to eighth place and, after Dawid Kubacki’s jump of 124.5 meters, they had only seventh Russians within reach.
Kamil Stoch was able to overtake these Russians too. He jumped 124 meters, 6.5 meters better than Yevgeny Klimov, thanks to which the Biało-Czerwoni finished the competition in seventh place, incl. behind Finland’s sixth (Aalto, Nousiainen, Heikkinen, Kytosaho), who returned to the team competition in style.
The podium of the competition in Lahti was identical to the team competition at the Olympic Winter Games in Beijing. The Austrians (Hoerl, Aigner, Wohlgenannt, Kraft) won thanks to the phenomenal last attempt by Stefan Kraft, who reached 128 meters from the lower beam at the coach’s request. The Slovenes (Jelar, C. Prevc, Zajc, P. Prevc), although they were in the lead for most of the competition, took second place with a loss of 5.5 points, as Peter Prevc only jumped 120.5 meters in the last jump. Third place went to Germany (Schmid, Freund, Eisenbichler, Geiger), fourth to Norway (Lindvik, Johansson, Tande, Granerud), and fifth to Japan (Sato, Nakamura, J. Kobayashi, R. Kobayashi).
Another individual competition will be held in Lahti on Sunday. Qualifications are scheduled for 2:30 PM, and the first competition series at 4:00 PM. Live coverage on Sport.pl.
Source: Sport
Tristin is an accomplished author and journalist, known for his in-depth and engaging writing on sports. He currently works as a writer at 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the sports industry.
