Vinzenz Geiger celebrated his second win of the season with a fantastic final sprint on the second day at the Nordic Combined Triple in Seefeld and can hope to successfully defend his title. The Olympic champion from Oberstdorf stormed to the front from fourth place in the last 300 meters of the compact race.
The 28-year-old is now heading into the final Gundersen race on Sunday as the leader. The “excess length” of the final cross-country run (12.5 km) is an advantage for Geiger, who stormed to the top from tenth place after jumping on Saturday.
“Today there wasn’t much tactics. I was behind Oftebro, he’s the best runner. And I knew I had to stick with it,” said Geiger: “That was extremely hard, but the final sprint went perfectly.”
In a thrilling final phase, six days before the Olympic opening ceremony in northern Italy, Geiger won his 19th World Cup victory by two tenths of a second over World Cup leader Johannes Lamparter (Austria), who had won the opener on Friday. Third place went to the Norwegian Jens Luraas Oftebro (+2.3 seconds).
“Happiness to Vinz, it was a very, very strong race. He did that well,” said national coach Eric Frenzel on ZDF. Frenzel won the first four editions of the Seefeld Triple from 2014 to 2017. Geiger was the second German combined athlete in 2025 to win the three-day competition.
The second best German was Johannes Rydzek in eighth place, who, like Rydzek and Geiger, qualified for the Olympics and Julian Schmid came in twelfth. Surprisingly, Richard Stenzel slotted in between them in eleventh place.
In the triple at the 2019 World Cup venue, the starters take their results with them from day to day. After a mass start on Friday, in which people first ran and then jumped, and the compact on Saturday, where the gaps after jumping are “capped”, there is a classic Gundersen competition at the end.
