Junge Welt: December 29, 2025 – Yearly Review

There are few sports where Olympic and World Championship titles are not necessarily the most coveted. Men’s ski jumping is one of them. The highest feeling is a victory at the Four Hills Tournament with always the same stations: Oberstdorf (December 29th), Garmisch-Partenkirchen (January 1st), Innsbruck (January 4th) and Bischofshofen (January 6th). The athletes’ main argument: External circumstances, especially the wind, can turn individual competitions into a lottery, but there are no random winners on the tour. In addition, there is the special feature of having to overcome four different jumps within a short period of time. And then there is the tradition. The Four Hills Tournament has been held since 1953, and there has only been a ski jumping World Cup since 1980.

For German ski jumping fans, before the 74th edition of the tour, the question once again arises as to when the next German winner will be. Sven Hannawald, who has now been retrained as a TV expert, was the last, that was 24 years ago. Some of his colleagues have been close since then, but it was never quite enough: Severin Freund (WSC-DJK Rastbüchl) took second place in 2016, as did Andreas Wellinger (SC Ruhpolding) in 2018 and 2024, Markus Eisenbichler (TSV Siegsdorf) in 2019 and Karl Geiger (SC Oberstdorf) in 2021.

Wellinger and Geiger are still there, but the season so far has been anything but rosy for them. In several World Cup competitions they failed to qualify for the final round of the best 30. Most recently, both were even removed from the World Cup team in order to be able to prepare individually for the tour. It would be like a miracle if they were suddenly at the top again. DSV’s hopes therefore rest on two late starters.

The 25-year-old Philipp Raimund (SC Oberstdorf) has been jumping and running in the World Cup for years. Last season he finished 24th in the overall standings. He is still missing a victory in a World Cup competition, but this year Raimund has already been on the podium four times. With one exception, he was always placed in the top eleven, which makes him fourth in the overall World Cup. Even more astonishing is the high form of 28-year-old Felix Hoffmann (SWV Goldlauter), who is in sixth place in the overall World Cup and recently came in second and third place at the jumping competitions in Engelberg in Switzerland, the dress rehearsal for the tour. In the last World Cup season, Hoffmann ended up in 50th place in the overall ranking. Before this season, he had never been able to place among the top ten in a competition.

The German squad is completed by Pius Paschke (WSV Kiefersfelden), who is also still following his form from last year, when he was the best DSV athlete in the overall World Cup ranking with fifth place. In addition, there are four people from the so-called national group who are eligible to start at the home competitions in Oberstdorf and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, including the 19-year-old Max Un Glaube from WSV 1923 Bad Freienwalde in Brandenburg, the northernmost ski jumping center in Germany.

Raimund and Hoffmann’s biggest problem when it comes to an attack on the tour victory: the excessive form of Domen Prevc (Slovenia) and Ryōyū Kobayashi (Japan), who are by far the leaders in the World Cup standings. Prevc has recently been on the podium eight times in a row (including five wins), Kobayashi has never been worse than seventh in the eleven World Cup competitions so far. Consistency is particularly important for a tour victory, which Kobayashi is well aware of. He has already triumphed in 2019, 2022 and 2024. If Prevc wins, it would be the first tour victory for Slovenia since 2016 – back then, Domen’s older brother Peter, who has now ended his career, won.

The Austrians are also not among the favorites this year, although they were able to celebrate a superior triple victory last year with Daniel Tschofenig, Jan Hörl and Stefan Kraft. The end was dramatic. After the eighth and final jump of the tour, the three Austrians were only separated by 3.1 points. The fourth-placed Norwegian Johann André Forfang was already almost 40 points behind. But while the first World Cup competition of this season in Lillehammer also brought a triple Austrian triumph (and exactly in the order of the previous year’s tour: Tschofenig ahead of Hörl and Kraft), the season after that was disappointing for the ÖSV Adler. There were just three podium places in the following ten competitions. Experienced Stefan Kraft is the best in seventh place in the overall World Cup ranking.

Last year’s triple victory was only the second in the history of the tour. Austria achieved the feat once before, in 1975, at the beginning of the then Austrian “ski jumping miracle”. In 1976, a quadruple victory would have been possible if Jochen Danneberg, who started for ASK Vorwärts Oberhof, hadn’t driven the Austrians into the parade. Danneberg also won the tour in 1977. On the way to the triple, he suffered a serious knee injury in a training fall in Innsbruck in 1978. Joy and sorrow are also close together in sport.

With a total of eleven victories on the tour, the GDR is still in a better position today than the Federal Republic of Germany with five – with two of the Federal Republic of Germany’s victories after 1989 being thanks to Jens Weißflog from Oberwiesenthal. In the all-time ranking of tour victories, Weißflog, who had already won twice as a GDR athlete, is in second place with a total of four victories – only the Finn Janne Ahonen has one more to his name with five victories.

Women are still not allowed to take part in the Four Hills Tournament, but that should change from next year. In November of this year, the Austrian Ski Association and the state of Tyrol agreed to install a floodlight system at the Bergiselschanze in Innsbruck, which will make the program more flexible. The women should then be able to hold competitions parallel to the men on all four ski jumps on the tour, as is already the case at most World Cup locations. This year the women have to be content for the third time with the “Two Nights Tour”, which is limited to Oberstdorf and Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The winner of the last two years was Nika Prevc, the youngest of the successful ski jumping siblings from Slovenia.

The DSV women’s squad is led by Agnes Reisch (WSV Isny), who is in seventh place in the overall World Cup ranking, one place ahead of the 2023 world champion on the normal hill, Katharina Schmid (SC Oberstdorf).