Silence can be heavy as lead. It can, for example, spread when two people have nothing to say to each other and still have to live in a hotel room. When they dive under headphones so that one doesn’t bother the other with hacking noises and horrible screams, while the other counteracts it with sweet piano music and tender dialogues. “Sometimes it is like that,” says Werner Schuster: “Some people like to watch horror films in the evening, others like romances.” And because there is nothing to talk about afterwards, they both fall asleep without a word.
Conversely, the ski jumping trainer Schuster also knows the prerequisites for successful room dynamics. From 2008 to 2019 he was head coach at the German Ski Association (DSV), the predecessor of the current trainer Stefan Horngacher, and of course he knows the jumping duo, which is currently known as the “flying double room” because of its success: Karl Geiger and Markus Eisenbichler .
It was only on Sunday that Eisenbichler defied second place with a last long jump on the unloved hill in Engelberg. He was in the shape of his life all December. Geiger, on the other hand, crept rather quietly in a rather eventful December, he kept improving his form until he suddenly became ski flying world champion almost two weeks ago, although he was never really that kind of flyer.
Geiger and Eisenbichler, these two are now going to be favorites in the Four Hills Tournament from December 28th together with the Norwegian Halvor Egner Granerud – although there is still one restriction. Because December not only brought Geiger a world title and his first child, a daughter, but also a positive corona test two days later. He has been in quarantine since then. He shows no symptoms. National coach Stefan Horngacher initially kept Geiger a place in the line-up. According to the DSV, a final nomination will take place “after the quarantine period and medical check-up” has expired. The okay of the health authorities should be decisive.
A new roommate? Eisenbichler wanted “with many others in the room like mi’m Karl”
The ski association is proud of its top duo, but also careful not to hide too much in the Geiger-Eisenbichler double room, because everything has its limits, and after the season they both fly home to the right family anyway. This community is comparable to that in a double office, they say. Even then, one of them inevitably overhears the other’s phone calls, learns of problems, remembers names that are none of his business, and still asks at some point. But when you go home in the evening, everything is forgotten. But is it really the same among ski jumpers?
The former DSV trainer Schuster wanted to loosen up the fixed occupancy a bit. He still remembers Eisenbichler’s answer to the suggestion for a new room plan, and he also has his Upper Bavarian dialect in his ear: “As long as I jump, I go into the room with others like me, Karl.”
Schuster respected the answer, also because he knew that famous duos already benefited from each other in his home country Austria: Andreas Goldberger and Werner Rathmayr, or Ernst Vettori and Andreas Felder. But how is it that a double room can inspire athletes so much? After all, a ski jumper is alone in a competition, yes, in those seven seconds up there in the air, he is one of the loneliest people.
The ski winters are long, especially those in ski jumping. World Cups are jumped or flown over 40 times, from November to March. And this winter there are also many highlights: two world championships, a tour, the Norway tour Raw Air and the World Cup final. A lot of time passes in between: on the plane, in the car, in the shuttle, before breakfast, after breakfast, at rest, before going to the ski jump, in the wax container, in the chairlift, in the waiting room on the ski jump tower. Time that you have to bridge somehow, if possible without interference, because ski jumping, says Schuster, “is a sensitive sport, you shouldn’t waste too much energy between operations”.
The tense calm before the flight: The jumpers Markus Eisenbichler (on the starting bar) and Karl Geiger (back, middle), here skiing in Oberstdorf.
(Photo: Jürgen Feichter / Eibner / Imago)
In order not to sink back into negative thoughts about the last screwed-up transition into the flight phase, hotel hobbies are cultivated outside of the jumps. Reading, playing table tennis, writing, studying for studies, gaming. Some tinker something, like the Pole Dawid Kubacki his helicopter models, others play guitar like his teammate Piotr Zyla.
And yet it’s not just about warding off destructive thoughts, but also about setting something decisive in motion and keeping it for as long as possible. Namely the form when jumping off the take-off table, this one movement with which the question of success is already decided, but which the jumper cannot manage if he is cramped. Say: thinks.
Karl Geiger and Markus Eisenbichler have probably passed the brooding phase. Their path in sport was similar, Geiger comes from Oberstdorf, Eisenbichler from Siegsdorf not far from the Chiemsee. Village, mountains, lakes and cycle paths are important to both; every year, at the end of the season in March, at about the same time as the migratory birds, they return to their families at home.
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