Japan’s Ryoyu Kobayashi became only the sixth man to win the prestigious Four Hills ski jumping tournament on three occasions. Kobayashi added the 2024 title to triumphs in 2019, when he swept all four rounds, and 2022 after finishing in second place in the last of the four events at Bischofshofen in Austria.
The 27-year-old joins Janne Ahonen (five), Jens Weissflog (four), Helmut Recknagel (three), Bjorn Wirkola (three) and Kamil Stoch (three) to have claimed three titles in the event held in Germany and Austria at Oberstdorf, Garmisch, Innsbruck and Bischofshofen.
“Today there was too much happening, but I concentrated on my jumping and I was really satisfied,” said Olympic champion Kobayashi. The Japanese star recorded jumps of 137m and 139m to finish second on the day with a total of 287.6 points.
That gave him an overall total of 1,145.2 points to the 1,120.7 points of closest rival, Germany’s Andreas Wellinger, who won the opening round at Oberstdorf. Kobayashi was beaten out for the win on the day by World Cup leader Stefan Kraft of Austria.
Kraft had trailed by just 1.2 points after the opening round and a 140m second round jump saw him sneak past Kobayashi for a total of 288.9 points. Kraft edged out Jan Hoerl, the winner at Innsbruck, to finish the tournament in third placed overall. Kobayashi won the Four Hills by recording four second-placed finishes behind four different winners at each of the rounds.
Ahonen was the last man to win the trophy without an event victory, doing so in 1999. Meanwhile, Slovakian skier Petra Vlhova took advantage of a big mistake by Mikaela Shiffrin to set the fastest time in the first run of the World Cup slalom at Kranjska Gora in Slovenia.
Five-time big globe winner Shiffrin straddled a gate in the second sector and failed to finish, ruling her out of the second run. It is the first time since the Beijing Winter Olympics in February 2022 that Shiffrin has gone out in her favourite event.
It marked the end of a poor weekend in Slovenia for the American, who has a record 93 World Cup victories under her belt, 56 of those coming in the slalom. She could only finish ninth in the giant slalom, her worst result in the discipline since November 2022.
Vlhova, who started the day in second place in the overall standings 307 points behind Shiffrin, clocked 51.30 seconds in the opening run. The German Lena Duerr was second and the Croat Leona Popovic third, both of them 0.26sec behind.—AFP
