Andreas Wellinger is the last remaining jumper from the 2014 Olympic champion team. Many injuries keep throwing the world-class ski jumper back. At 27, he is now in top form. As far as his broken knee allows.
As a quiz question, not a sure-fire success even for die-hard ski jumping fans: The cast of the German team at the sensational Olympic gold medal in Sochi in 2014? Severin Freund, sure, Andreas Wellinger, sure. But then? No violinist, no Eisenbichler, no Friday: Andreas Wank and Marinus Kraus have been able to call themselves Olympic champions for almost nine years - pure regulars' table gold.
When the 2022/23 World Cup season begins this weekend in Wisla, Poland, Wellinger will be the only ski jumper still active in the gold four - Freund and Kraus had ended their careers in the summer, Wank already retired in 2019. "I'm getting old, don't you see?" Says Wellinger with a hearty laugh - because at 27 he's in the prime of his ski jumping years.
"I had the privilege of joining extremely early at 17 and being able to start quite furiously. Theoretically I'm still young, practically I'm relatively old," says the man from Ruhpolding, who despite his great experience belongs to the younger half of the German World Cup team - Pius Paschke is 32 years old, Markus Eisenbichler 31 and 29-year-old Karl Geiger are older, only Constantin Schmid and Philipp Raimund, both 22 years old, are younger.
If Wellinger were a car, it would be a youngtimer: fairly late year of construction, plenty of distance on the odometer, full service history, but not accident-free. The Sochi triumph was followed by Olympic gold in 2018 in the individual and two more medals from Pyeongchang, but then major setbacks with the cruciate ligament rupture in 2019 being the low point. A possible Olympic qualification screwed up a positive corona test at the beginning of the year.
"My knee is broken, I accepted that and it won't change," says Wellinger: "The rest works fine." As good as he hasn't been for a long time: he said goodbye to the previous season with strong performances and team silver at the World Flight Championships, in the Summer Grand Prix he was the strongest German and recently became the German Champion.
Almost a decade after the early peak of his career, a golden career autumn could now begin. "The past few years have been extremely difficult. But now I'm fully motivated for the next season and the one after that and I have no idea how many more years are left," says Wellinger: "After all, ski jumping is the greatest thing there is."
(This article was first published on Friday, November 04, 2022.)
