The Continental Cup from Lahti, which should take place this weekend, was moved to Ruka due to a lack of snow.
Today started with two training rounds at 15:30 CET where last weekend’s winner Andreas Wank showed he will be jumping for a place on the podium. The German jumped 133.0 and 141. metres, finishing training as first and third. Another good performance had team Slovenia: Ziga Jelar ended both training rounds as the second (137.0/140.5m), his teammate Nejc Dezman as sixth and first (129.5/141.5m).
Talking about the Slovenian team in the first round, it has to be mentioned that Jurij Tepes who came from the World Cup finished as first in front of Florian Altenburger from Austria and Nejc Dezman who were equal in points with Tomaz Naglic, another Slovenian.
The second round, however, had another Polish surprise for everyone: Tomasz Pilch, who won his first Continental Cup last weekend in Canada, showed the longest jump of the day with 143.5 metres. This second jump made him climb up the ranking from the eighth to the first place. With a total of 298.3 points he won in front of three Slovenians:
Nejc Dezman finished as second (293.8pts), Ziga Jelar as third (293.7pts) and Jurij Tepes became fourth with a weaker jump of 133.5 metres in the final round and 292.7 points. Tomaz Naglic took the eighth place at the end of the day with 274.2 points.
Not only the Slovenians could be satisfied with their team performance today, also the Austrian team had a good day in Ruka: Altenburger, Lackner and Aschendwald finished as fifth (280.5pts), sixth (279.3pts) and seventh (275.9pts).
The Top 10 were completed by Cestmir Kozisek on the ninth position (271.9pts) as best Czech athlete and Mats Bjerke Myhren in the tenth place (270.7pts) as the best athlete from Norway.
Andreas Wank became best German as the eleventh (264.8pts) while Jarkko Määttä finished as best Finn in the 14th place (258.6pts).
Picture: Slovenian B-Team
Carolin Erbe
Newsskijumping 