The three Germans had been standing in the presentation zone for a long time, biting into their gloves and exhaling so loudly that you thought you could hear it from below. They actually had a safe lead in the penultimate quarter – but then the opponents, Slovenians and Norwegians, straddled with fabulous jumps in between, and suddenly the last jumper of the evening and of the entire normal hill weekend had to stand a long jump: But Andreas Wellinger , already second in the singles, stayed calm. He reached the right altitude, enjoyed the air up there and touched down safely well behind the green line.
Then they danced together, Selina Freitag, Katharina Althaus, Karl Geiger and Wellinger. They looked like a family and celebrated – not excessively, but stronger than usual. Wellinger was the last jumper, but another person probably had a greater share in the success. Katharina Althaus had already achieved a fabulous distance in the first round, and in the final she landed again far, wobble-free and safely and laughed. Althaus might have guessed that this sentence meant her third individual gold medal on the normal hill and the team. In the end, the 26-year-old was the winner of the evening.
As in the previous competitions, this evening was also a matter of nerves. The wind picked up, dropped again, picked up again and all within a few minutes. The actors sat on the beam and waited, came back and often still had miserable conditions. But on Saturday evening she had already praised her women’s team with Luisa Görlich and Anna Rupprecht, who celebrated in flip-flops, for gold: “We all did a great job,” she said: “We kept our nerves.” Wellinger had previously said: “It’s a bit unreal, but super cool.” And Geiger added: “It’s the greatest thing to win together with the team. It’s amazing what happened here.”
The same was true on Sunday evening. For Althaus personally, mixed jumping meant the next step in her vita. With her seventh gold medal, she is now at the top of the list of the best World Championship participants. Only the Austrian Thomas Morgenstern is ahead of her with eight World Cup victories.
