1956 Winter Olympics / Ski jumping

Nordic skiing 1956, further disciplines: Nordic combined skiing  

Ski jumping at the XXI. Winter Olympics
information
venue	Pragelato
Competition venue	Trampolino Stadium
Nations	16
Athletes	53 (53 men)
date	5th February 1956
decisions	1
← Oslo 1952 Squaw Valley 1960 →

At the XII. Olympic Games 1956 in Cortina d'Ampezzo , a competition was in the seventh time ski jumping discharged.

The jumping took place as the last competition of the Winter Games on February 5th on the newly built Trampolino Italia , whose critical point was 72 meters. The competition ended with a Finnish double victory in which Antti Hyvärinen triumphed in front of Aulis Kallakorpi in front of 21,382 spectators. After the first round, the East German Harry Glaß , who finished third in the final ranking, won the bronze medal.

For the first time in Olympic ski jumping history, the previously dominant team of Norwegians was defeated. This had put all six Olympic champions in the discipline by 1956. The Soviet team, which started at the Olympic Winter Games for the first time, did not meet the expectations set up beforehand and did not intervene in the decision.

Preparations

Hill construction

The jumping took place on the Italia hill built in 1955 (photo from 2006).

→ Main article : Trampolino Italia

In front of the Olympic hill in Zuel, a suburb of Cortina d'Ampezzo, there were already two other ski jumping facilities. The second ski jump, which had replaced the first facility in 1939, was already called Italia . It was demolished in April 1955 to make room for the Olympic hill, which was planned to be the "most modern ski jumping hill in the world" at that time. The architects of this facility were the Italian Guglielmo Holzner and the Swiss Reinhard Straumann , whom the International Ski Federation (FIS) nominated as a technical expert. In addition, three other Italian engineers, Piero Pozzati, Enzo Mantovani and Luciano Berti, worked on the design. During the construction of the Trampolino Italia , some elements were used for the first time on a ski jump. For example, the architects developed a parabolic approach that slowed the athletes down less than a straight one. They also modified parts of the outlet to keep the landing pressure on the athletes as low as possible. This was almost the same for jumps between 20 and 72 meters (around 82 kilograms). When the critical point was exceeded , the pressure rose quickly, making it more difficult for the athletes to land safely after their attempt at distances over 72 meters.

In his reports, the FIS representative Reinhard Straumann was convinced of the Italia-Schanze, which opened in December 1955: It was a "structural masterpiece" and could "be regarded as exemplary in every respect". The technical delegate Pelle Øhman saw a few minor weaknesses such as a miscalculation at the starting points, which the organizers compensated with some makeshift measures, but otherwise praised the hill and particularly emphasized the technical innovations. In several Olympic reviews, the Trampolino Italia was compared with the ski jump on Holmenkollen , where the decision had been made in 1952. The big difference was the capacity of the two facilities: While there was space for almost 200,000 spectators on Holmenkollen, the ski jump in Cortina was designed for a maximum of 46,000 visitors.

organization

Guglielmo Holzner, the architect of the Italiaschanze, acted as race director for the jumping competition. Holzner was also a member of the twelve-person Olympic Executive Committee and head of the sub-commission responsible for ski jumping. There were eight other men on the jury next to him, including the five judges, including the former German champion Erich Recknagel . The jury met before and after the competition in a designated room - where the bobsleigh jury also met on other days - but did not intervene in the competition with their decisions.

competition

Regulations

All athletes who started completed two jumps, each of which was assessed with a distance score and a style score. In order to determine the posture grade, five jumping judges gave their evaluation (maximum 20 points). The highest and lowest scores have been deleted; the other three grades added up to the style grade, which could be a maximum of 60 points. So that posture and width were included in the overall assessment, the maximum number of points was also 60. The athlete who jumped the furthest received this number of points in both rounds. For every meter that an athlete less achieved, one point was deducted from the maximum number of points, correspondingly half a point for half a meter. In this way, two scores were determined, which were added in both rounds to obtain the intermediate or final classification.

German qualification

At the Olympic Games from 1956 to 1964, the athletes of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic formed the all-German team . However, this joint team only existed during the Olympic Games; In the meantime, the athletes trained completely independently of each other. Hans Renner was the head coach for the East German athletes Harry Glaß and Werner Lesser. It was agreed to put together the team from the four best jumpers in four competitions. In addition to a competition in Oberhof, this included the first three competitions of the Four Hills Tournament in 1955/56 in Oberstdorf , Garmisch and Innsbruck .

Jumpers and jumps		Oberhof		Oberstdorf		Garmisch		innsbruck		Overall grade
		Widths in m	grade	Widths in m	Grade in m	Widths in m	Grade in m	Widths in m	grade
Harry Glass	GDR	68.5 + 64.0	217.0	72.5 + 74.0	219.0	78.0 + 74.0	218.5	76.0 + 73.5	223.0	877.5
Max Bolkart	FRG	73.5 + 63.5	222.5	71.0 + 73.0	216.0	76.5 + 74.5	216.0	75.0 + 70.0	217.0	871.5
Josef Kleisl	FRG	66.0 + 63.0	211.5	68.0 + 70.5	205.5	72.5 + 75.0	211.5	70.5 + 68.0	208.0	836.5
Werner Lesser	GDR	68.0 + 62.0	207.0	71.0 + 71.0	209.5	74.0 + 70.0	202.0	71.0 + 66.0	206.0	824.5
Toni Brutscher	FRG	64.0 + 61.0	206.5	68.5 + 70.5	209.5	70.0 + 70.5	202.0	69.0 + 64.0	197.5	815.5
Sepp Weiler	FRG	66.0 + 65.0	212.0	70.5 + 70.5	191.5	75.0 + 71.5	211.5	67.0 + 64.5	197.0	812.0

initial situation

The Georgian Koba Zakadze (here jumping in 1963) was highly valued before the Olympic Games.

Up until the Olympic Winter Games in Oslo in 1952 , the Norwegians played the leading role in international ski jumping: They won all six Olympic competitions and 14 out of 18 possible medals. In the following four years, however, the Finnish team improved steadily and finally ousted the Norwegian team from the leadership position - also because of the fish style they had particularly mastered . 1954 in Falun with Matti Pietikäinen triumphed for the first time a Finn at a regular Nordic World Ski Championships , a year later Hemmo Silvennoinen won the Four Hills Tournament . In other international jumping competitions in the winter of 1954/55, the Germans also achieved top positions, such as 22-year-old Max Bolkart , who missed victory by just one point in the preparatory competition in Cortina. The Soviet athletes were also highly valued, in particular the Georgian Koba Zakadze , who won the competition in Innsbruck , one of his first international competitions, in January 1956 . The greatest difficulty of the Soviet jumpers, who regularly reached great distances, was the landing, for which they usually received deductions in the style mark. Zakadze, whom the German sports journalist Harry Valérien described as a “perfect ski flyer” with “excessive courage” before the Olympics, expressed himself optimistically: He would achieve a high score if he “stopped only twice and did not […] through the Wiggle spout ".

Overall, the Finnish ski jumpers were considered the most promising contenders for victory immediately before the Olympic Games, especially since the two best Norwegians Arnfinn Bergmann and Torbjørn Falkanger - the gold and silver medal winners of the 1952 Games - canceled their participation due to illness or injury. Because of this favorite position, there was an internal team dispute about the position within the team, which was made clear in the starting positions. Since Lasse Johannesen , who had formed the young Finnish team two years earlier as national coach, was dissatisfied with Antti Hyvärinen and accused him of lack of temperament and too little willingness to take risks, he put the 23-year-old in an early start group. The three years older Aulis Kallakorpi should start as the last Finn and thus secure the favored Eino Kirjonen and Hyvärinen to the rear. The fourth athlete in the team was Hemmo Silvennoinen, the Four Hills Tournament winner from 1954/55. After the Olympic jump he complained in a Finnish newspaper that he - like Kirjonen and Kallakorpi - could not sleep because of the squabbles in the team. This prevented him from getting a better result than tenth place.

Course of the competition and result

space	athlete	country	Width 1st floor width 2nd floor	Style 1. DG Style 2. DG	score
1	Antti Hyvärinen	FIN	81.0 m 84.0 m	54.0 55.5	227.0
2	Aulis Kallakorpi	FIN	83.5 m 80.5 m	54.5 54.0	225.0
3	Harry Glass	EUA	83.5 m 80.5 m	55.0 53.0	224.5
4th	Max Bolkart	EUA	80.0 m 81.5 m	55.0 53.5	222.5
5	Sven Pettersson	SWE	81.0 m 81.5 m	52.0 53.0	220.0
6th	Andreas Däscher	SUI	82.0 m 82.0 m	49.5 53.5	219.5
7th	Eino Kirjonen	FIN	78.0 m 81.0 m	53.0 54.5	219.0
8th	Werner Lesser	EUA	77.5 m 77.5 m	51.0 51.5	210.0
9	Sverre Stallvik	NOR	77.0 m 75.5 m	51.0 52.0	208.0
10	Hemmo Silvennoinen	FIN	75.5 m 77.0 m	50.5 52.0	207.5

Date: February 5, 1956 (start at 11 a.m.)

The weather conditions during the last competition of the 1956 Winter Olympics were exceptionally good: unlike in the training sessions, there was no wind, the snow was compact and fast, so that the competition went off without any external disturbances. The competition was opened by the Italian Enzo Perin with a jump of 67 meters. None of the first 20 athletes exceeded the 80-meter mark, neither the Finn Hemmo Silvennoinen nor the winner of the Nordic combined , Sverre Stenersen from Norway, succeeded in attempting the distance that was necessary for a placement among the top five athletes. With the starting number 21, Antti Hyvärinen reached 81 meters and after a successful telemark landing took the lead. Shortly afterwards Koba Zakadze, who fell far behind in the classification due to a faulty landing despite a jump to 80.5 meters, and Hyvärinen's team mate, the third Finn Eino Kirjonen, failed because of this performance. Only the German Max Bolkart , who completed his jump in 29th place, got the same number of points as the Finn. The only athletes who were among the best in both the wide points and the style mark during the first round were the Germans Harry Glaß - who was surprisingly in the lead - and Bolkart and the two Finns Hyvärinen and Aulis Kallakorpi. Glaß and Kallakorpi, who both landed at 83.5 meters, had the longest jumps with start numbers 46 and 47, one after the other. The Russian Nikolai Kamensky jumped just as far ; However, he fell on landing and therefore broke off the competition after the first round. So no Soviet athlete intervened in the decision about the medal ranks. The Norwegians, of whom Arne Hoel and Sverre Stallvik, tied on points, were best in the competition as eleventh, played no role either.

Harry Glaß (here two weeks after the Olympic Games) was in the lead after the first round and finally won the bronze medal.

Since the athletes started the second run in the same order as in the first attempt, Antti Hyvärinen was the first of the four winning candidates to set a distance. Despite a shortened run, he jumped to 84 meters and thus showed the longest jump of the entire day. The jump, which in Olympic retrospectives was described as “something unique” or as a “truly Olympic flight”, was also given the highest style mark given by the judges at this competition. None of the remaining competitors reached the distance of Hyvärinen: Max Bolkart, who had tied on points with the Finn after the first round, jumped 2.5 meters shorter; Harry Glaß and Aulis Kallakorpi landed at 80.5 meters. The two Germans Bolkart and Glaß were subsequently attested that their jumps were "paralyzed" or "powerless"; unlike Hyvärinen, they were unable to improve in the second round. Kallakorpi placed himself in front of Harry Glaß with a slightly better style mark in the final ranking and thus completed the Finnish double success. The third best Finn Eino Kirjonen improved his distance in the second attempt from 78.5 to 81 meters and finally finished seventh.

Review and criticism

With the double victory, the Finnish ski jumpers had clearly maintained their leading position. The Austrian journalist Kurt Bernegger wrote in Kurt Jeschko's review of the Olympics that the “spontaneous increase in the finals” was particularly important for her success . The German athletes who were otherwise equal, lacked this ability. Nevertheless, Bernegger noted a "Central European break-in" into the "'jump fortress' Scandinavia". This also included the sixth place of the Swiss Andreas Däscher and the eighth place of the German Werner Lesser . In addition to the winners, the Central Europeans and the Finns, the Austrian also saw several losers, first and foremost the Norwegians, whose "failure [...] is simply a mystery to the professional world". The Soviet and US teams, as well as various smaller teams, did not build on the previous work and were therefore considered a disappointment. Oberhofer Erich Recknagel , who acted as jumping judge, concluded that the new aerodynamic fish style had finally established itself. In this he saw the problem of the Norwegians: They had not yet switched to the new technology and therefore could not reach the vastness of the Finns and Central Europeans. Hans Renner , the supervisor of the GDR athletes, saw the reason for the success of the East German jumpers primarily in the intensity of the training. Lasse Johannesen, the coach of the Finns, made a similar statement. Before the games, he stated that each of his athletes had completed at least 400 training jumps.

The retrospective judgments about the jumping competition were divided: Almost all observers praised the competition from a sporting point of view, but criticized the Italian audience, which, especially in comparison with the 180,000 spectators at Holmenkollen in 1952, was noticeable as not very competent and “strangely untouched”. Heinz Maegerlein wrote in his report for the standard work of the National Olympic Committee for Germany that it was “incomprehensible” to him that so few visitors came to see “the grandiose play […], the largest and most beautiful [ n] Jumping Run in Sports History ”. In addition, Magerlein criticized the hectic pace of the competition: the spectators had no time to think about the performance, so nothing was reverberated.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Volker Kluge : Olympic Winter Games - The Chronicle . Sportverlag, Berlin 1994, ISBN 978-3-328-00631-2 , p. 140.
2. ↑ Information about the Trampolino Italia at skisprungschanzen.com.
3. ↑ ^{a b} The Ski-jump Italia (p. 134ff .; PDF; 27.0 MB) in The Official Report of the Organizing Committee of the VIIth Winter Olympic Games 1956 at Cortina . Retrieved January 5, 2011.
4. ↑ Pelle Øhman: Jumping (p. 617ff .; PDF; 27.0 MB) in The Official Report of the Organizing Committee of the VIIth Winter Olympic Games 1956 at Cortina . Retrieved January 5, 2011.
5. ↑ Capacity Of The Venues (p. 188; PDF; 27.0 MB) in The Official Report of the Organizing Committee of the VIIth Winter Olympic Games 1956 at Cortina . Retrieved January 5, 2011.
6. ↑ The Ski And Bobsleigh Office (p. 317ff; PDF; 27.0 MB) in The Official Report of the Organizing Committee of the VIIth Winter Olympic Games 1956 at Cortina . Retrieved January 5, 2011.
7. ↑ Harry Glaß again in second place. In: New Germany . Archives of the Berlin State Library, January 7, 1956, p. 8 , accessed on November 24, 2013 (free registration required). 
8. ↑ Harry Valérien : Koba Tsakadze . In: German Olympic Society (Hrsg.): Olympic fire . Issue 2, February 1956. Page 9.
9. ^ ^{A b c d e} Kurt Bernegger : New Springer ^Great Power - Finland . In: Kurt Jeschko (Ed.): VII. Olympic Winter Games Cortina 1956 . Werner Riekmann Verlag, Baden 1956. pp. 93f.
10. ^ Festival of the ski jumping event of the "Italia-Schanze" . In: Harald Lechenperg (ed.): Olympic Games 1956 - Cortina d'Ampezzo • Stockholm • Melbourne. Copress-Verlag, Munich 1957, p. 93ff.
11. ↑ Special Jumping (p. 623ff .; PDF; 27.0 MB) in The Official Report of the Organizing Committee of the VIIth Winter Olympic Games 1956 at Cortina . Retrieved January 5, 2011.
12. ↑ special jump run . In: Heinz Schöbel (Ed.): VII. Olympic Winter Games Cortina d'Ampezzo . Sportverlag, Berlin 1956, p. 78.
13. ^ Paul Laven : Antti Hyvärinen . In: German Olympic Society (Hrsg.): Olympic fire . Issue 3, March 1956. Pages 12–13.
14. ↑ Heinz Maegerlein : A flight can be so beautiful . In: German Olympic Society (ed.): The Olympic Games 1956 . Pp. 167-171.

Remarks

1. ↑ There are contradicting figures about the number of viewers, which fluctuate between 15,000 and 30,000 visitors. This is due to the fact that several thousand people did not buy a ticket and watched the competition outside the stadium.
2. ↑ At the ski world championships in 1941 a Finn also triumphed with Paavo Vierto . However, the FIS declared the results of this World Championship to be invalid in 1946 because many nations - including Norway - had not participated in the competitions.
3. ↑ The competition rules stipulated that the inrun had to be shortened if the K-point of the hill (at the Italia 74 meters) was exceeded by eight percent. This was the case with the jumps of 83.5 meters from Glaß and Kallakorpi in the first round.
4. ↑ At the Olympic Games from 1956 to 1964, the athletes of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic formed the all-German team . However, this joint team only existed during the Olympic Games; In the meantime, the athletes trained completely independently of each other. Hans Renner was the head coach for the East German athletes Harry Glaß and Werner Lesser.