Thecountdown to the World Championships in Val di Fiemme is really ticking down and how better to use the time we still have to wait for the competitions to start then with a little bit of speculating who could take a medal this year. For now, let’s get started with the Team Events!

Looking at the last World Championships on Oslo the podiums were identical in both the Team Events on the large and normal hill: Austria winning ahead of Germany and Norway.

The Team Event – Favourites on target, or are they?

For this year’s “full” 4×5 km Team Event, the recipe seems simple enough. Take you standard ingredients of Germany, Austria and Norway, mix, stir a bit and you will have pretty good chances to have prepared your World Championship podium in 2013… or so it seems. For sure, judging after the last few competition weekends, the German team looked close to unbeatable but then again nobody knows how the Norwegian and Austrian team shape has developed in the last pre-World Championship camps and if Frenzel, Edelmann, Rydzek Co might have peaked early with their top shape.

For Val di Fiemme, the French team also has a big agenda of finally getting that coveted team medal after so many fourth places. The chances for that to happen are not too bad either. Lamy Chappuis, Braud, Laheurte and Lacroix have proven this season that they can absolutely perform on one level with the other top nations like Germany and Norway. After their third rank in the Team Event in Schonach, the US team has also to be reckoned with. On a good day, a medal is definitely in reach for Demong, Spillane, Lodwick and the Fletcher brothers.

Team Sprint even harder to predict

For the Team Sprint, which will be celebrating it’s maiden World Championships in this season, a prediction is even more difficult to make. We will only know at the very end of the World Championships how the actual teams consisting of two athletes will look like and that will probably depend also on the performance of the individual athletes in the events before this last Nordic Combined race of the WSC.

Looking at the statistics after the format’s reintroduction in the last season, the duo of Jason Lamy Chappuis and Sebastien Lacroix was the most successful one: in four races, the won once and claimed two third places. In the fourth race, Lamy Chappuis paired up with Maxime Laheurte and ended up second.

Another successful Team Sprint starter is Norway’s Mikko Kokslien who – with varying partners –  also piled up a first, second and third rank in four races. And of course, in their current shape, the team from Germany – however it will actually look like in the end – will be a hot favourite.

But also “underdog teams” like Italy’s Pittin/Runggaldier or Slovenia’s Jelenko/Oranic can look back on successes in this format: a second and a fourth rank are listed for these combinations. In the end, like it always is at title event, the best team of day will win. If it is a team that was expected to stand on the very top of the podium on not, well that definitely remains to be seen!

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