In April, the Polish hill country team was buzzing. A legend of the sport Adam Malysz received public criticism from his team when he fired the head coach as athletic director For Michal Dolezal.
Under the Czech coach, Poland received only one bronze medal at the Beijing Olympics. In the World Cup country ranking, Poland was only sixth.
Malysz did not digest the results, instead hiring a 33-year-old Austrian to replace the popular Dolezal by Thomas Thurnbichler. The decision tested the relationship between Malysz and the Polish ski jumpers who were attached to Dolezal. Malysz told (you switch to another service) in the spring, the criticism of the jumpers hurt him a lot.
Eight months later, however, Malysz seems to have hit a gold mine. Leading the World Cup Dawid Kubacki has won four of the eight races of the season, and Piotr Zyla has accompanied success with two third places.
When the three-time Olympic champion Kamil Stoch is also returning to the top, the Poles have collected the second most Cup points after Austria.
2:55 p.m., Areena and 4:55 p.m. TV2: Mäkiviikko, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, qualifying
At 2:55 p.m., TV2 and Areena: Mäkiviikko, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 1st round At 4:10 p.m., TV2 and Areena: Mäkiviikko, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 2nd round
At 14:25, TV2 and Areena: Mäkiviikko, Innsbruck, qualifying
At 14:25, TV2 and Areena: Mäkiviikko, Innsbruck, competition
17:25, TV2 and Areena: Mäkiviikko, Bischofshofen, qualifying
At 17:20, TV2 and Areena: Mäkiviikko, Bischofshofen, competition
The above-mentioned trio made it to the top six in the Oberstdorf race qualification, which was jumped on Wednesday, so Poland can be considered to start from the pole position for the hill week that begins.
Thomas Thurnbichler has gained fame and honor from the new arrival of Poland, but for the general public the coach is still a very unknown case.
Kojonkoski says he refused
Between 2005 and 2022, men’s ski jumping has competed for team hill medals 16 times.
Austria has won ten of the gold medals, Germany three, Norway two and Poland one. All these countries have had one common denominator in their winning moments: the head coach has been Austrian.
The streak will most obviously continue in February at the World Championships in Planica, as this season the three countries with the most points, namely Austria, Poland and Norway, as well as the reigning world champion Germany, trust the Austrian head coach.
Against this background, Poland’s coaching decision is not surprising.
It could have been otherwise.
When ski jumpers compete for Olympic medals in Beijing in February 2022, the Chinese ski jumping project who has spent the last few years Mika Kojonkoski traveled to the main event of the Polish Ski Federation in Krakow.
According to the man himself, he did not have to return to his home in Kuopio empty-handed. Malysz wanted Kojonkoski to be Poland’s head coach.
– I could decide for myself whether to go or not. The idea was delicious, but I decided that I would no longer travel 220 days a year, says Kojonkoski.
A young promise at the helm
In the spring, Kojonkoski ended up putting his name on the contract paper of the Finnish Ski Association, which made the 59-year-old from Kuopio ski jumping and combined sports director.
He did the same job in 1997 in the Austrian Ski Federation Toni Innauer, who attracted attention by hiring Kojonkoski as Austria’s head coach. When the deal was revealed on April 12, Kojonkoski was only 33 years old.
Samanikäinen is Thurnbichler, who in the spring of 2022 took responsibility for the men’s hill country team from Poland.
– I see a lot of the same in Thurnbichler’s hiring as in Mika’s case. In Finland, they wondered why I wanted to hire Mika, but I knew what I was doing, Innauer, who won the Olympic gold in the normal hill in 1980 and was the sports director of Austrian ski jumping for 17 years, says over the phone.
On his way to becoming the chief architect of Austrian ski jumping, Innauer, 64, graduated from the University of Graz in 1987 with a master’s degree in philosophy, psychology and exercise science. However, Innauer’s original degree program was the University of Innsbruck, where Thurnbichler also has a master’s degree in physical education.
The same path has also been trodden by top Austrian pilots Alexander Stöckl and Werner Schuster. Stöckl has been Norway’s head coach since 2011, while Schuster rose to fame in Germany and then returned to Austria’s most famous sports high school and ski jumping think tank Stams.
As for the head coach of Poland, according to Innauer, Thurnbichler was the best of the options and Kojonkoski was not Malysz’s number one horse either. That’s what Innauer calls the leader of Austria’s gold march in the 21st century by Alexander Pointner.
– Thurnbichler would have played a role in Pointner’s project as well, but Pointner would have led everything. He wanted to reform both men’s and women’s ski jumping and the training of coaches in Poland. In practice, the entire culture of the sport. After the corona, Poland had no more money for that. So they took the cheaper option, says Innauer.
In this case, cheaper did not mean weak. Thurnbichler got Pointner, who had worked as second coach in his time, as his assistant Marc Nölken and a meritorious one on the medium side Mathias Hafelen.
– Poland has good athletes, a good elite sports culture and, in general, however, very good resources and conditions. They can be used as a basis for why they have quickly risen back to the top, Kojonkoski estimates.
My career hit a rough patch
Thomas Thurnbichler is a second-generation ski jumper. His father Walter Thurnbichler was Innauer’s jumping buddy whose grits weren’t enough for Innauer, by Reinhold Bachler, Willi Pürstlin, Karl Schnablin, by Hubert Neuper and by Armin Kogler against names like
The careers of Thomas and his brother Stefan Thurnbichler, who is five years older than him, also coincided with the wild years of the 21st century, when the main responsibility for the Austrians’ gold laundering was Thomas Morgenstern, Andreas Kofler, Gregor Schlierenzauer and Wolfgang Loitzl.
From Veljeks, Stefan finished fourth in the World Cup competition.
Thomas, on the other hand, made it to the World Cup qualifiers only once, in Bischofshofen 2008, when Janne Ahonen secured his fifth and final hill week victory. Thomas Thurnbichler, who won World Championship medals in juniors, was 45th and ended his career three years later, at the age of 22.
– It was a typical story of an Austrian ski jumper at the time. The level at the top was so hard, Innauer recalls.
On the cusp of success
According to Innauer, Thurnbichler’s jumping career ended with a back injury. After this, the young man got excited about freestyle skiing, until in 2015 he got the spark for downhill coaching and got into the University of Innsbruck.
Innauer considers Thurnbichler’s strength to be not only his extensive knowledge of sports physiology, but also his years of jumping experience and memories left in his teeth.
Before Poland, Thurnbichler had time to coach the Austrians by Daniel Tschofenig and Niklas Bachlinger’s youth world champions. However, according to Innauer, these gold medals have not satisfied the hunger of the young coaching wizard.
However, Tschofenig and Bachlinger were a calling card for Thurnbichler, whose Austrian head coach Andreas Widholzl redeemed by hiring Thurnbichler as his assistant coach in the spring of 2021. Only a year later, the assistant boy is playing in the rival’s camp, whose results are already threatening Austria’s number one position.
Innauer describes Thurnbichler as a determined coach with a high work ethic and education.
– If a weakness has to be named, it could be a lack of temper, which is common for people his age. A career can’t just be a stepping stone. The test only starts when difficulties come into the picture, says Innauer.
However, Innauer predicts success for Thurnbichler in the hill week starting today.
– Kubacki is the favorite, but Stoch, who is in a strong upward trend, knows best among the modern jumpers how to win the hill week. Luck is still needed to win the overall competition, Innauer reminds.
He if anyone knows what he’s talking about. In the hill week of 1975-1976, the 17-year-old Innauer won the races in Oberstdorf, Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Bischofshofen, but a crash in Innsbruck (24th) dropped him to fourth in the overall points.
– When eight jumps are included, the best does not necessarily win, says Innauer.