Return to the fateful mountain of the Germans

On the Bergisel in Innsbruck, many a dream of a German victory in the Four Hills Tournament has ended in the snow of Innsbruck. The mountain is considered the mountain of destiny for the German ski jumpers, who actually like the hill. Meanwhile, a real tragedy puts all sporting annoyances into perspective.

Karl Geiger was fed up at the beginning of January 2021: "I'm pretty fed up at the moment and don't expect anything more from the overall standings. But I don't really care," grumbled the actually very level-headed Allgäu native on January 4 in Innsbruck. With a disastrous first jump, he had thrown away any chance of following in the footsteps of Sven Hannawald on the Bergisel. Hannawald had won the Four Hills Tournament in 2002, and no German has been able to repeat that since. "The fact that it's like that again this year just makes you want to vomit. I'm sorry for the choice of words," said Geiger in frustration on Eurosport at the time. It was simply "really bitter".

In the end, the German still managed a strong second place in the overall standings of the 69th Four Hills Tournament, but in Innsbruck he had already lost the tour victory. "I have to get the system down a bit first. At the moment I could really kick myself anywhere. I don't really know myself like that. But it's still emotional," he said on ARD. The later double world champion's anger was just another in a long line of German frustrations on the Olympic ski jump from 1964 and 1976, which has long since been rebuilt and reconstructed several times.

Now the world's ski jumping elite are once again gathered on the slope with a view of the Innsbruck cemetery, which has long since earned a reputation as the "fateful mountain of the Germans": In the afternoon, the qualification for the third competition of the 72nd Four Hills Tournament will take place, on Wednesday it's all about the next points for the overall victory (1.30 pm/ ARD and in the live ticker on ntv.de).

With Andreas Wellinger, a German will arrive as the tour leader, the chances of the first German tour victory since 2002 are better than they have been for a long time - even if the lead over pursuer Ryoyu Kobayashi is a tiny one meter. Wellinger, who won in Oberstdorf and sailed to third place in the New Year's competition, got into the car in Garmisch-Partenkirchen with "a really good feeling", as he announced. Wellinger cannot win the tour at the third stop - but he can certainly lose. And many German dreams have already been shattered in the outrun of the Bergisel ski jump.

Schmitt crashes and loses the tour

In 1999, Martin Schmitt was at the peak of his abilities and the hype surrounding the young German ski jumpers was slowly approaching boiling point. Schmitt had traveled to the tour as the World Cup leader, and the then 20-year-old won in Oberstdorf and Garmisch-Partenkirchen. He later defended his title as overall World Cup winner and became world champion in the individual and team events. In Innsbruck, however, everything went wrong: instead of continuing his run, Schmitt crashed in difficult conditions in qualifying and only managed 13th place in the competition.

High up in the clouds is the lounge of the professionals.

"Realistically speaking, I was the favorite to win the overall title back then. I was in the best shape in 1999 and had the best chance of winning the tour at the time," Schmitt later recalled in an interview with ntv.de. "After Oberstdorf and Garmisch, I also jumped the furthest in the qualification in Innsbruck - and crashed, for the second time that season. I had already jumped too far at the World Cup in Oberhof and crashed quite badly. Now again and this situation has thrown me off my stride a bit."

In addition to the mental problem, there was also a technical problem: "The conditions had changed for the last two jumps, I wasn't in a good position in terms of equipment and there was no way to react properly," Schmitt explained his personal situation on the Bergisel in 1999. "Back then we didn't have a technician with us, everyone was responsible for themselves. So I still prepared my skis myself and we simply had the wrong polish. Back then, you couldn't just quickly rework your skis, especially if you only found out on the day of the competition. Then Innsbruck went wrong and our tour hopes were practically dead." In Bischofshofen, the high-flyer landed in 14th place and slipped from third place in the tour ranking.

Hannawald dominates and flies towards history

Sven Hannawald fared very differently to Martin Schmitt in 1999 and Karl Geiger in 2021. On his way to sporting immortality, he also won the Bergisel competition after his triumphs in Oberstdorf and Garmisch-Partenkirchen - and two days later in Bischofshofen became the first jumper ever to win the Grand Slam. 18 years after Jens Weißflog won for himself and the GDR in Austria in 1984, there was jubilation in black and red and gold for the first time again.

The competition in Innsbruck, Hannawald gushed at the time, was "a really cool bomb. It's sensational. I don't understand it at all. Despite all the nervous pressure, I just manage to do phenomenal things." In the first round, he pulverized all the competition's faint hopes with a hill record of 134.5 metres, and Hannawald left Innsbruck with the equivalent of a 24-metre lead over the overall runner-up Adam Malysz. The rest is sports history.

Freitag wins - and falls bitterly

However, a golden era did not dawn for the German jumpers in the narrow cauldron of the Bergisel: after Hannawald's miracle flights in 2002, it took another 13 years for the next DSV athlete to reach the top. Richard Freitag was the last German to win in 2015. However, the memories of Innsbruck are also very clouded for the Saxon: in 2018, Freitag was the German hope for a tour victory, trailing leader Kamil Stoch by just 11.8 points after the first two jumps.

Freitag, who ended his career in 2022, came to the Bergisel as the overall World Cup leader and in great form. But in the first round, all dreams died within seconds: Freitag landed at a strong 130 meters, but he fell and injured himself. He was in "very severe pain", said the national coach at the time, Werner Schuster, and Freitag was taken to hospital instead of the second round. There was a lot of anger in the German camp: "It was definitely too much inrun. There is a technical delegate here who pursues a different strategy. It was extremely difficult," said Schuster on ZDF. Freitag no longer competed in Bischofshofen.

Former overall World Cup winner Severin Freund, who was the best German in the 2022 qualifiers and ended his career a few weeks later, was also once on course to win the tour - until he came to Innsbruck. Freund won in Oberstdorf in 2016 and finished third in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Only eight points separated him from leader Peter Prevc in the overall standings.

In the trial run on the Bergisel, Freund then hit his back on the snow and suffered a painful hip injury. In pain, he was able to finish the competition and ultimately the tour, but in Innsbruck he lost eleven points to the eventual overall winner Prevc. "It was wonderful and extremely fun - with a little scare and a few injuries," said Freund after his final second place in Bischofshofen with a small reference to his fall in Innsbruck.

"A blede Sau": Eisenbichler and the Bergisel

Markus Eisenbichler, who finished fifth in the 2021/2022 tour, has his own eventful history on Innsbruck's local mountain. "The Bergisel is just a blede Sau from time to time," said Eisenbichler in 2021, after his friend and room partner Geiger had sealed his fate on the tour. The German ski jumping team trained at Bergisel several times in the summer of 2021 due to the stressful history. "We even took our scientists with us, set up cameras and made new technical adjustments to the hill," reported Horngacher.

The second round in January 2019 also went really badly: Eisenbichler was the only one to stand up to the outstanding Ryoyu Kobayashi, with 4.2 points separating the two after the first two tour competitions. However, 123.5 meters were far too little after a passable first round, and the Japanese ended up jumping almost 15 meters further in the daily standings.

Things went better not even two months later in the same place: "I'm over the moon, I feel a lot of adrenaline, I'm shaking right now," said a delighted Eisenbichler. "That was one of my best jumps ever. Now I'm world champion, I can't believe it," jubilated Eisenbichler on February 23, 2019, just a few minutes after becoming world champion from the large hill on the Bergisel - ahead of Geiger. "Both have already shown in the qualification with first and second place that they can cope here," said the then national coach Werner Schuster. Eisenbichler doesn't have to worry about the Bergisel this time: the Bavarian is in such poor form that he wasn't even called up to the tour team by Schuster's successor Stefan Horngacher.

"Woe betide them if they break off"

That used to be very different: Eisenbichler himself had already got into the car to Innsbruck once with the best prospects of at least a podium finish: that was in 2017, and in the end he was a big loser in a wild wind lottery. The 112 meters from the first round were more of a bounce, in 29th place he just about managed to make it into the second round to be able to repair things a little.

"Don't let them break off," he pleaded, but the jury ran out of time: because there were no floodlights on the Bergisel even after the recent reconstruction, there was only one jump for everyone after an eternal first round. Eisenbichler, who fell back to 6th place in the overall standings, did not blame others for the poor jump: "I'm more annoyed that I was at the table a bit too early. My God, it was just windy. Sometimes you have it good, sometimes you have it bad," said Eisenbichler.

And yet he likes the hill: "Innsbruck is tricky, but in good weather it's a beautiful hill," he once said. In 2022, Eisenbichler delivered a fantastic training jump of 139 meters, and in the qualifiers he still managed a solid eighth place.

However, he doesn't want to look at the weather forecast again before jumping on the extremely wind-prone hill, where "bizarre things have often happened" (Horngacher). "For what then? I can't change it anyway. Should I text St. Peter and say: 'Spezi, can you make it a bit sunnier?" He should have written better: After all, there was no jumping in "Windsbruck" in 2022: gusts of up to 8 meters per second finally led to the jumping being canceled after an eternal wait, and the Four Hills Tournament became a three-hill tour with two jumps in Bischofshofen for the second time ever.

Last year, the German jumpers, who were miles away from the world's best for almost the entire winter, experienced a collective sporting collapse in Innsbruck: Philipp Raimund was the best DSV eagle in 13th place, Wellinger staggered to 18th place and Karl Geiger didn't even make it to the second round.

A true tragedy

But all this is just sport, it's about winning and losing, nothing more. It was also a matter of life and death on the Bergisel, the "Bergisel tragedy" has burned itself into the collective memory of Tyrol and beyond in a terrible way. On December 4, 1999, eleven months after Martin Schmitt jumped far behind here and just one month before the tour returned to Innsbruck, there was a moment during a snowboarding event in the Bergisel stadium, which was filled to the rafters and perhaps overcrowded, when real fate struck mercilessly: Five girls lost their lives as they left the cauldron, two other young women succumbed to their serious injuries years later. A further 38 people were injured, some of them seriously, and four are still in need of care today. They were crushed and overwhelmed by a wave of people making their way out of the stadium at the west exit.

"Police officers had to fire warning shots to clear the way for paramedics to reach the victims and to prevent paramedics from being trampled themselves," wrote ORF. A culprit for the drama was not found, various trials ultimately led to acquittals.

This text was first published, slightly modified, on January 4, 2022.