Andreas Wellinger: The hope flyer from Traunstein

How a person ticks what he enjoyed for education can usually be seen quickly, if only in nuances. Even if you can’t really look into anyone. Andreas Wellinger showed one or two of these nuances on Sunday evening at the press conference in the Granasen ski center near Trondheim. When he was asked in English by a reporter who had forgotten to imagine, he asked back with a smile: “And who are you?” Later, after the last question, he wished everyone “a nice evening”. The impression was: someone sits there who shows interest who is facing – and brought up very well.

At that day, Wellinger has become a flying flyer of the Germans at the Nordic Ski World Cup, and not for the first time. The now 29-year-old was once, at 19, when his star really rose. And it still looks almost like a louse, an almost ideal cover boy. He has now won silver in Trondheim on the normal ski jump for the DSV ski jumper, whose plumage had been badly torn in the past two months since her crashing on the four-hill tour. And when asked whether he could already believe it all, he said: “I just stowed my equipment, was still in doping control, and now I’m sitting here in the press conference. I think it will take a few more hours until tomorrow maybe. I’m just happy about my performance. And about standing on the podium. “

Wellinger was born in Traunstein and grew up with his two older sisters Tanja and Julia in Weißbach in the Chiemgau. At the age of six he saw Sven Hannawald win the tour on all four ski jumps on television, when he was twelve he moved from the junior high school in Traunstein to the ski boarding school in Berchtesgaden. At first he was a Nordic combiner, at 15 he switched to the special leap.

The trainers raved about his courage, body feeling, from his levers. And the parents tried to dew down the star. “I have fears in that the pressure from the outside could be so great that it can no longer concentrate on ski jumping. I think he lets this easily come and hopefully a head too big about many other things, ”said Hermann Wellinger 2012 of the SZ.

Now comes the big hill, three World Cup competitions

Sometimes the head couldn’t be outwitted. Wellinger has already experienced all ups and downs in ski jumping business, in 2014 and 2018 he became Olympic champion, 2017 and 2023 world champion. In November 2014 he fell heavily in Kuusamo in Finnish and increased the spine and a dislocation of the collarbone joint that had to be operated on. He didn’t recover for years, jumped after. In June 2019, during training on the Mattenschanze in Hinzenbach, he tore the cruciate ligament in the right knee, in the spring of 2020 he broke his collarbone while surfing in Australia. In September 2021 he suffered a meniscal tear. The 2022 Olympic Games missed Wellinger because of a covid disease, then it slowly went up again-the World Cup title in Planica showed that.

When the black months for the Germans started in January, with negative records in the World Cup, Wellinger was still the greatest constant in the German team. “For me it was still best, stable around 15th place. But I didn’t manage it either, ”he said after his World Cup silver.

How did he find back on track? Wellinger has changed a lot, his ski has been from Marcel Hirscher’s company for years. And shortly before Trondheim, at the training camp in Oberstdorf, they also changed things in the start -up behavior and a suit. He is now a little looser in the crouch of his great strength to be able to better use the “long Haxn”, as he says, better. His levers are almost ideal. In addition, it was “about the tension of the suit. We made a little more train in the total length, we talk about one centimeter, so almost nothing ”. But that helps Wellinger already in fine -tuning: “90 percent of what makes the lightness now is the body feeling and the leap.”

With this body feeling and new self -confidence, Wellinger jumped to 106.5 and 104.5 meters on Sunday – and has thus triggered a small wave of euphoria among the German ski jumpers in this way. So the fourth -placed Karl Geiger said, his long -standing companion: “I said a few weeks ago where we were kicked with feet: don’t write down! We tried to keep calm. If you get threshing from all sides, it’s not easy. But wave and me, we are also mentally on the point where we should be. ”

Now comes the big hill, three World Cup competitions, starting with the mixed on Wednesday. The Bakken is located to the Germans, which have been emphasized again and again in the past few days. During a course in summer 2024, “we had a few nice flights there. We can now appear with a wide cross, ”says Geiger. Wellinger, this narrow guy from the Chiemgau, has no broad cross at all. But a lot of feeling for the moment.