With the “High-Five”, a new competition format was tested in the first two summer grand prix in ski jumping. However, the mode did not have more than a few good approaches – also because our author believes that there was little effort.
There has not been little left of the shine that the summer grand prix once sprayed in ski jumping. Basically, not much shines in addition to the name of the competition series. The starter fields cannot be compared to those in the World Cup and now the competitions act as a test balloon for innovations that are (should) be introduced.
It was also on the first two weekends in Course Evel, France and the Polish Wisła. A new group mode was tested there on Sunday. The race director of the Ski World Association FIS, Sandro Pertile, came up with this, although on closer inspection of the two previous experiments with a group modes in 2000 and 2014. Both attempts failed miserably at the time, but as is well known, three are three.
In a nutshell, the starter field of 40 jumpers in the women and 50 in the men should be divided into equal five groups, from which the two group best and the five further points are moved into the final round as Lucky Loser. For 25 participants, this one jump should literally go, because their scores were reset to 0. Say: everyone really had the same chance to win the competition for themselves with this one jump.
But that only worked to a limited extent. For women, the starter fields were smaller at both competition locations than the minimum number that would have been used for the format, which also adapted the size of the groups. While there were still eight groups of four, i.e. 32 athletes, were registered in Wisła 38, but two of whom had to fit briefly with knee problems, so there was a wild mix of groups of four and five. The only at short-term name of this format, namely “High Five”, which had not even made it into the official FIS regulation, was therefore not justice.
The ambiguity behind the name, namely that the participants interact with each other and should clap after the end of the respective groups, seemed very wanted. Not least because in Couplevel it was seen several times how Pertile’s Fis colleague Berni Schödler hired both women and men in an animator-like manner that they may be clapping-although he could almost sorry.
Positive: “High-Five” produces sensational podium
While these pictures had little to do with sports, at least Sunday in Wisła produced a historical result: a second place for Danil Vassilyev. A Kazakhen who, like his compatriots before, was not suspected of being a podium jumper. But his first podium at world-class level, which has not yet been successful in Kazakh ski jumper, is a direct episode of the mode. If, as usual, both passes had been evaluated, he would have ended up in sixth place – with which he would have set the best Kazakh result in history.
Thus, the “High Five” has at least a big plus: its unpredictability could be for further splashes of color like this, precisely because only one passage decides on the end result. But the truth also includes: the likelihood of this is much larger in summer, where the top athletes are largely missing, much larger than in the much more relevant World Cup. In addition, this one passage becomes a lottery from this one passage in the case of weather caps, so that in the end it is not the best, but the happiest wins.
The even bigger problem of the experiment lies in the traceability of the mode. And there not only have to put on a shoe.
Negative: insufficient to missing TV graphics
Neither in advance on social media nor in the TV transmission, the course of the “high-five” has been adequately explained. How the groups were formed was not shown and how many participants in each group entered into the final was only learned at the end of each group.
In addition, apart from the mandatory irrigation breaks, it was missed to show the overall intermediate stand during the ongoing competition, but also the intermediate stand of the respective groups. So if it was the turn of the fourth of five jumpers, the TV viewer did not know how the three opponents had cut off beforehand. In addition, the second round felt like a first. Especially because you didn’t know how many athletes would come.
These are all elementary prerequisites to understand what is happening. It is not enough to only complement the start list in the run -up to the competition and to show the outcome of each group in order to understand the mode in its entirety.
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Something was expected by the spectators that they could not afford and the athletes occasionally seemed something lost and expressed themselves very cautiously in Toto. In the fans, criticism in social networks was understandable. Because if die-hard ski jumping fans did not feel taken with them, because you have given yourself very little effort, especially when it comes to displaying in TV transmission, how could you be attractive for new ones?
This was exactly a ulterior motive for the introduction of the mode: to attract new target groups. In view of the recent ratings, this request is also correct. On top of that, the ski jumping would do a certain variety of formats in view of the mass of individual jumping, otherwise threatening monotony.
In this implementation, the “high-five”, like its predecessors, was intended for a prime example of (conditionally), but not skillfully. Without improvements, there is little that would justify its planned introduction to the 2026/2027 World Cup season, let alone require.