The Japanese skier, Akito Watabe has been accumulating wins for a while now in the World Cup. A short while ago, he managed to put himself into first place just before the leader of the world cup at the time (Lamy-Chappuis) in the Nordic Combined competition in Liberec. His performance in the cross country race was quite impressive since he managed to finish in a clean twenty-six minutes and 17.2 seconds. His time just so happened to be a full 18.2 seconds ahead of Lamy-Chappuis. Lamy-Chappuis ended up having to settle for second place, just ahead of Austria’s own Mario Stecher who finished in third. Even though Lamy-Chappuis had ended up in second, he surely was not too worried about it since it basically paled in comparison to his later race in which he only managed to finish in twenty-first (ouch). Despite all of this, Lamy-Chappuis still had a nice 183 point lead over Watabe with an overall total of 1253 at the time. Private group heliskiing
Unfortunately for Lamy, Akito Watabe's victory streak seemed to just be getting started. The Japanese skier’s late charge for the FIS Nordic Combined World Cup title gathered pace in Oslo as he dominated throughout to claim his third win in the space of a month. heliskiing canada
He ensured that his winning spree continued while he was in Norway and then moved on to gather even more wins.
Watabe set himself up for gold with an impressive ski jump – his leap of 107m giving him an overall total of 135.3 and a cushion of 20 seconds going into the cross-country ski. Tino Edelmann jumped 104.5m for 130.3 overall and second while Bernhard Gruber, despite recording a distance of 105.5m, only scored 130.1 and was a further second behind in third. But neither of them were able to topple Watabe as he stormed around the cross-country course and crossed the finishing line in first in a winning time of 26:21.4 minutes. Mikko Kokslien made up a 58-second cushion after scoring just 120.9 after the ski jump to take silver almost eight seconds behind the runaway Japanese winner. That pushed Edelmann out of second with the German seventh but Gruber did hold on for third, 1.7seconds behind Kokslien, with fourth-placed Norwegian Joergen Graabak 32.7 shy of Watabe. And, with World Cup leader Jason Lamy Chappuis’ inconsistent form continuing, Watabe closed the gap on the Frenchman to 72 points with his total now 1202.
Lamy Chappuis was always going to be out of contention after ranking just 31st following the ski jump but did improve to 23rd with his leading total 1274.