SKI JUMPING. The first qualification of the 60th 4-Hills-Tournament is over and it seems to be an exciting competition on December 30th (4:30 pm CET live on FISskijumping.com).

Because the Norwegians issued a challenge to the Austrians, and one with a big exclamation mark. Tom Hilde won the qualification with a jump on 133 m (141.9 points) ahead of his teammates Rune Velta (137.5 points) and Vegard Haukoe Sklett (133.7 points). The Norwegians are in top shape right on time for the 4-Hills-Tournament. Head coach Alexander Stoeckl can look forward to the upcoming competitions.

"There is no perfect jump, but that one was close and it was at least the best of the season", Hilde said to FISskijumping.com. "The conditions were okay, even if the pre-qualified athletes had to worst conditions today. Now I'm looking forward to the competition and hope that we won't have problems with the weather", he told.

Kofler and Bardal are the favorites

But Andreas Kofler showed the 6 500 fans in the Erdinger-Arena a awesome jump on 142 m. This was the longest jump in the qualification. He is ready to fight for his second 4-Hills victory. Also Anders Bardal, another Norwegian, showed a great jump on 138.5 m under tailwind conditions. Bardal is definitely one of the contestants for the victory of the Tournament.

K.O. duels again at the 4-Hills

The other top favorites didn't have very good conditions and were not among the best this evening. So there will be some interesting duels in the K.O. round in the competition. Kamil Stoch from Poland will compete against Kofler and Richard Freitag against Wolfgang Loitzl. This will be interesting, only five "lucky losers" will reach the final round.

That's of course also the goal of Simon Ammann, who almost couldn't make the cut in the qualification. The Swiss suffers from a flu and didn't have good conditions. But at the end it was enough for Ammann, who has not yet won the 4-Hills-Tournament, to qualify.

All three Finns in the competition - Ahonen is also here

Good performances were also shown by Lukas Hlava from the Czech Republic, Denis Kornilov from Russia and Jure Sinkovec from Slovenia. Also German veteran Martin Schmitt showed a good jump, his teammate Michael Neumayer failed to make the cut after good jumps in the training rounds.

Also Slovene Jurij Tepes and the Russians Dimitri Ipatov and Anton Kalinitschenko could now qualify for the competition. All three Finnish jumpers will be able to compete. "The rest of the team had their skis, but mine got lost on the way to Munich. That's why I had to jump with my summer equipment. The binding system is different and that's not perfect", said Anssi Koivuranta.

The Finnish team had some special encouragement at the hill. Janne Ahonen, who is the only athlete who could win the 4-Hills-Tournament five times, is also in Oberstdorf.

FISskijumping.com
29.12.2011 18:31

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