During the dress rehearsal for the Nordic World Ski Championships in Planica, Germany’s ski jumping hopeful Karl Geiger once again made an exclamation mark. In his column, the 30-year-old writes about bus breakdowns in the Romanian provinces and his goals for the high point of the season in Slovenia.
The bus driver turns the key, the engine stutters, another attempt, another stutter, but the crucial ignition doesn’t succeed. My teammates’ faces grow slightly longer. We are somewhere in the early evening in Romania on a road from Rasnov to Bucharest.
If we hadn’t been so hungry, we wouldn’t have had to stop. If we hadn’t stopped and turned off the engine, it would still be running and would take us to the hotel near the airport in good time.
Thinking about it is pointless and you have to eat after a competition. We quickly finish our snack, roll up our sleeves and feel more like ski-jumping bobsledders.
The Romanian bus driver is happy about our commitment and even more so when the vehicle starts up again. We jump on the bus in a hurry and are hopeful that we haven’t lost so much time on the originally calculated arrival.
Ski jumping in Rasnov “made fun”
The rest of the bus ride gives me another opportunity to review the World Cup weekend. Third place in the individual competition and victory in the super team competition with my teammate Andreas Wellinger put me in a good mood, especially since I haven’t been on the podium so often this season.
The German ski jumping team didn’t stay away from the last World Cup before Planica like other teams, but saw it as training for emergencies and in particular the Romanian hill as ideal preparation terrain for the 95 hill in Planica.
I have to admit that I only know the World Championship hills from the summer and that I will have to get used to the hill formats a bit, so that the World Cup in Rasnov was indeed good preparation for what is now imminent: the Nordic World Ski Championships.
“Lows and highs” for Karl Geiger in winter 2022/2023
The season so far has been marked by some ups and downs, but in Planica the reset button is pressed and the cards are reshuffled again. Four competitions are ahead of us, namely the individual on the large and normal hill, the men’s team competition and the mixed team.
It’s good that the competition schedule initially includes jumping from the normal hill, which seamlessly ties in with the normal hill jumping in Rasnov.
The highlight of every World Cup is of course the team competition, where we perform as a nation and where this time we have to compete against strong competition: the Norwegians, the Austrians, the Slovenians, who have a home game, and the Poles have teams this winter They proved their strength and this in addition to the fact that they naturally also have individual victory jumpers in their ranks.
My personal goal can be described as follows: I would like to start in all four competitions and show good jumps.
Best regards
Karl Geiger