The ski jumper Andreas Wellinger is a two-time Olympic champion and two-time world champion, and in normal times he also delivers top placings in a row in the World Cup. At the moment, Wellinger is a worry for the German Ski Association (DSV), because he has never been as bad as he was this season.
It is now even difficult for him to qualify for the field of the 50 best jumpers in a World Cup competition – at the start of the season in Lillehammer he was ranked 56th. And on Sunday in Klingenthal, Saxony, this highly decorated athlete also failed to qualify as 57th out of 64 jumpers.
Wellinger and the “choppy movements”
In the nine World Cup competitions this late autumn, Wellinger only made it into the second round of the top 30 twice, and five times it was over after the first jump. Considering the demands that 30-year-old Wellinger places on himself, this is a shocking result that has consequences: Wellinger quits the World Cup team and goes to a special training camp.
This makes him the second athlete in the German A squad to receive special development support after Karl Geiger, who is also in crisis. Geiger had already decided not to travel to Klingenthal due to his loss of form, but Wellinger actually felt ready for the task after a special jumping course in Ramsau. But after finishing 40th on Saturday, he realized that he was far from being competitive: “I’m leaving the team.” Reason: “My jumping performance is just bad at the moment. I can’t manage to be consistent. It’s such choppy movements.”
Because of these choppy movements, his flight system cannot develop, so Wellinger lands early. Or to put it another way: “If you imagine that you don’t drive the car around the curve in one swing, but with four or five corners – that’s exactly how jumping feels to me at the moment.”
Because he is “a bit stuck in place at the moment”, he will now work harder to train his jump. This usually happens on small hills because the take-off and the transition into the flight phase are particularly important there. According to reports, Wellinger will travel to Oberstdorf and Planica. He will therefore miss the next World Cup weekend in Engelberg, Switzerland.
Wellinger had already explained at the DSV media day at the end of October that “I have to improve. I have to stabilize my jumps and find the right setup given the suit changes that have occurred.”
Clearly he hasn’t succeeded yet. National coach Stefan Horngacher said in an interview with the FAZ: “There is still something to do for Andreas in terms of fine-tuning the material. Ultimately, he simply has to jump better technically.” Wellinger is a great jumper with “long levers, but if you can’t use them, it has a bigger impact.” Now it’s about “boosting” Wellinger up again with lots of jumps. It is said from people around Wellinger that he does not seem desperate in view of the situation, but rather very organized and ambitiously trying to correct his mistakes.
Martin Schmitt, once a world-class ski jumper himself and currently working as a youth coach for the German Ski Association, sees a bigger problem with Wellinger in an interview with the FAZ: “His movement isn’t working right now. If he works on it, his jump will feel different than it did last time. He has to let go of the feelings he’s trained in. That’s not easy.”
Ski jumping is a sport in which error patterns are clear in theory, but in which correction in practice is not always uniform. At Wellinger, it could happen “that you don’t find the right approach. Then you put yourself under additional pressure – then a catch-up process can take weeks and months.” Nevertheless, according to Schmitt, Wellinger is an athlete who can adapt quickly: “He needs aha moments. Then he can regain his footing relatively quickly, even towards the top ten in the results list.” Schmitt Wellinger is confident that he will be able to find such an aha moment during his special training: “It will be okay.”
