Germans in Olympic form in front of Beijing

“We Germans can already ski a bit,” said Josef Ferstl and had to smile a bit at his knowledge of the Wengen Super-G. Ferstl took sixth place on Thursday, 0.86 seconds behind the Swiss winner of the day Marco Odermatt – and he wasn’t even the best of his team. Because Romed Baumann came a quarter of a second faster from the mountain to the valley and finished fourth.

Baumann confessed that he “felt at home all along the route”: “I got into driving really cool.” And with that, one day before his 36th birthday, the veteran proved for the first time in a long time that his silver medal was in the Super-G at the 2021 World Ski Championships in Cortina d’Ampezzo was more than a late glow of its great potential. After the “cautious start to the season”, as Baumann himself diplomatically expressed after two failures and ranks 20 and 26 in his specialty discipline, his performance in the replacement race for the Super-G, which had failed twice in Lake Louise and Bormio, was “good for me Self-confidence ”.

His mood would have been even better if he had made it through the finish line at full risk, “then it would have been enough for the podium,” as Baumann himself recognized. A short crossover in this late key passage certainly cost him more than the three hundredths that separated him from third place in the final bill.

Ferstl, on the other hand, declared his “good sixth place” with the fact that he had managed to “go fully on the attack”. After two years that were difficult for him personally, in which “always some crap” blocked him, as he described his many small injuries, this time he was able to switch off perfectly on the track: “I didn’t have anything on my mind,” he said in a wonderfully blunt way Wise.