The ski jumpers moved on from Finland to Norway
where competitions will be held in Trondheim and
Oslo over the next couple of days. The World Cup
weekend at these traditional venues started with
the qualification at the Granasen in Trondheim on
Thursday evening.
The best in this round was Reruhi Shimizu of Japan,
who clearly won the qualification with a jump on
136 m and a total of 146.8 points.
Michael Hayboeck of Austria, with 134.5 m and 139.2
points, and local hero Rune Velta of Norway, who
also jumped on 134.5 m and finished third with 138.0
points, got closest to the 20-year-old Japanese.
For the hosting team of Norway, also Tom Hilde in
seventh and Ole Marius Ingvaldsen in ninth could
show good performances.
The two Slovenes Tomaz Naglic and Jernej Damjan
were among the best in fourth and fifth, Anssi Koivuranta
of Finland shared the fifth place with Damjan and
also proved his currently good shape.
A week before the ski flying World Championships
in Harrachov, the Czech team showed a good and close
performance. Roman Koudelka, Antonin Hajek, Cestmir
Kozisek, Jakub Janda and Jan Matura came in 8th,
10th, 12th, 13th and 16th.
Among those who failed to make the cut for Friday's
competition were Denis Kornilov (42nd), Lukas Hlava
(43rd), Markus Eisenbichler (47th), who replaced
Karl Geiger on the German team, and Jurij Tepes
(49th). This was especially disappointing for the
Slovene: In training he posted an outstanding jump
on 138.5 m, then 116.5 m in the qualification were
not good enough.
Freund sets new record
Once again Severin Freund presented himself in a
great shape. The German set a new hill record with
141.5 m. Besides Freund, Thomas Diethart (135.5
m) and Peter Prevc (134.5 m) showed the best jumps
of the already pre-qualified athletes. Kamil Stoch
jumped on 139.5 m in the second training round and,
like Simon Ammann, skipped the qualification. Noriaki
Kasai wasn't jumping at all on Thursday.
