Hiroaki Watanabe

Hiroaki Watanabe
nation	Japan
birthday	September 18, 1991
place of birth	Iwamizawa ,  Japan
Career
society	Nihon University
National squad	since 2007
status	active
Ski jumping world cup / A class jumping
Debut in the World Cup	19th January 2013
Overall World Cup	69th ( 2019/20 )
Ski Jumping Continental Cup (COC)
Debut in the COC	January 10, 2009
Overall ranking COC	54th ( 2019/20 )
Podium placements 1. 2. 3.  Single jump 0 0 1
last change: March 13, 2020

Hiroaki Watanabe ( Japanese 渡 部 弘 晃 , Watanabe Hiroaki ; born September 18, 1991 in Iwamizawa ) is a Japanese ski jumper .

Career

Watanabe gave his international debut at the FIS Cup on March 5, 2007 on the Zaō hill in Yamagata . He landed in the points in his first competition. In January 2009 he started in Sapporo for the first time as part of the Ski Jumping Continental Cup and surprisingly won 12 Continental Cup points as 19th. So he reached, although it was his only jumping in the season, 134th place overall in the 2008/09 season . Just a few days after his first Continental Cup competition, he was part of the Japanese team at the Nordic Junior World Ski Championships in 2009 in Štrbské Pleso . After a rather disappointing 40th place in the individual competition, he reached sixth place with the team in the team competition.

After two victories in Yamagata in the FIS Cup and in a lower class FIS jumping , it took two more years until Watanabe again competed in a higher series. Until 2011 he only switched between FIS jumping and FIS Cup. In January 2011, he competed in Sapporo again in the Continental Cup, but missed scoring points short and landed in two competitions in the top 40. In the 2011 Winter Universiade in Turkey's Erzurum he reached in the two individual competition the spaces 16 and 20th

Two more years later in January 2013 Watanabe achieved surprisingly good performances in Sapporo with two 12th places and a sixth place in the Continental Cup. As a result, only one week later, on January 19, 2013, he got a starting place on the Ōkurayama hill as part of the ski jumping world cup . In his first competition he reached the second round and won his first two World Cup points. He could not repeat this in the second jump. It therefore remained his only two World Cup starts of the 2012/13 season , which he finished 79th tied with Russian Anton Kalinitschenko .

At the 2020 Continental Cup weekend in Sapporo , Watanabe, who previously only participated in Continental Cup competitions in Japan, started on an international level for the first time in a year. After he achieved the best result of his career to date with fifth place on the first day of the competition, he was able to improve even further in the second competition and was third on the podium for the first time. At the end of February 2020, Watanabe won World Cup points for the first time in more than seven years when he jumped from Trambulina Valea Cărbunării in Râșnov to 28th place. He had moved to the World Cup team because the A-Team took a break before the final weeks of the season.

statistics

World Cup placements

season	space	Points
2012/13	079.	002
2019/20	069.	003

Continental Cup placements

season	space	Points
2008/09	134.	012
2012/13	092.	084
2013/14	113.	024
2017/18	151	004th
2018/19	124.	015th
2019/20	054.	135

Web links

• Hiroaki Watanabe in the database of the International Ski Federation (English)
• Hiroaki Watanabe on The-Sports.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ COC-M: First win of the season for Klemens Muranka , on berkutschi.com, from January 26, 2020, accessed on January 26, 2020.