Third, fourth, fifth – Philipp Horn’s record at the Biathlon World Cup in Hochfilzen reads as if his form curve was pointing downwards. The opposite is the case. He showed that in Tyrol right at the start on Friday with third place in the sprint. It was a first for the 31-year-old Thuringian. For the first time he was on the podium in an individual World Cup race.
Although he had to give up this podium place in the pursuit on Saturday after a shooting error, he wasted no time on the cross-country ski trail and secured fourth place. “Crazy,” he called it, “third and fourth place is awesome.”
It had already been indicated the previous week in Östersund/Sweden that Horn was to be expected this winter. With eighth place in the individual, he immediately met the national standard for the Olympic Games. “The calm at the shooting range in the individual races,” he said, is now important to take with you to France. The last World Cup of the year begins there on Friday.
But first Philipp Horn has to find it again, this calm, because he had lost it in the relay race on Sunday. He missed four times, adding to the German team’s poor shooting performance. David Strobel even opened the race with a penalty lap, and Philipp Nawrath and Justus Strelow also had problems, so that the quartet only had fifth place.
The Norwegian team won superiorly ahead of France and Sweden. “In the relay you have extra pressure,” Horn found an explanation, but also said: “Unfortunately it wasn’t perfect from start to finish. But we are within striking distance.” This applies at least to the sub-discipline of cross-country skiing, as Justus Strelow also noted: “In terms of running, we were much closer to the top in the world today than in Östersund.”
