59 guns are lurking behind her and everyone wants to catch up with her. She is the hunted one – and takes the inevitable flight forward, deep into the dark forest, even with a loaded rifle in her knapsack. Will Franzi escape?
The hunting horn could not be heard, and the stadium loudspeakers would probably have swallowed a halali, it was so loud again on Saturday in Hochfilzen. And while the 9,000 spectators in the biathlon stadium performed their halligalli, the German ski hunter Franziska Preuß glided like a shy deer through the Tyrolean undergrowth, where the Dunkelbach flows somewhere between the coniferous trees. Preuß, a woman from Ruhpolding, escaped the water. But not their huntresses.
In Hochfilzen the loudspeakers boom particularly loudly
Preuß, who had won the sprint the day before, was challenged in the second half of Saturday’s hunt race by the eventual winner Lou Jeanmonnot from France and her own teammate Vanessa Voigt, who ended up second and looked significantly happier at the finish than a year ago , when this stadium had driven them to despair. “I’m happy to be away from Hochfilzen now, away from the stadium announcer, away from the volume,” the Thuringian explained on the ARD live microphone in December 2023 after a significantly less successful race. “I just want to shoot in peace and not always have to be spoken to personally on the mat. That’s annoying.”
A year later, stadium announcers Stefan Steinacher and Vanessa Voigt met again in the Hochfilzen stadium, where the sound system was as loud as almost everywhere in Austrian winter sports arenas, even if noticeably less noise from the loudspeakers reached ski hunters’ ears at the shooting range than in the grandstand area. But anyone who suddenly stands there from the silence of the deep forest and is supposed to hit the target has a task ahead of them. “Hochfilzen is very special, at other World Cup venues it might be a little different for the Germans because English is spoken there,” explained the 27-year-old in the mixed zone after the race. “When German is spoken over the loudspeaker, you simply perceive it differently.”
And the thing with the stadium announcer? “That’s a thing of the past for me,” said Voigt. Steinacher approached her again. “But I have to say, you can also complete things easily and don’t have to dig around in old quirks.”
For the 49-year-old from Steinach, this matter was actually less easy to complete at the time. A year later, during a visit to his house in neighboring Fieberbrunn, he reported on an unprecedented shitstorm that had hit him after Voigt’s TV interview. He received anonymous messages “that read like death threats.” This resulted in a chase of the uglier kind, “that kept me busy for a while,” says Steinacher. He has been moderating almost every biathlon and ski race for two decades, between Kitzbühel, Antholz and Schladming. But one detail is important to him: According to the television images from a year ago, he did not speak to Voigt during the shooting, i.e. not on the mat, but before or after.
From twelfth place in the sprint to second in the pursuit: Voigt was satisfied after all
Maybe both will shake hands again, biathlon is – apart from the live small-caliber shotguns – the most forgiving sport of all, where German fans cheer Norwegian winners (like in the subsequent men’s pursuit, which Johannes Thingnes Bö won, Philipp Nawrath came eighth ) and Austrian supporters celebrated French and German women, as on Saturday at the award ceremony for Jeanmonnot, Voigt and Preuß.
Voigt made a pretty reconciled impression after working her way up from her 12th place in the sprint race from lap to lap. While her teammate Preuss, who was still in the lead at halftime of the race, shot past a total of three times, Voigt cleared all 20 targets. And had an unorthodox explanation for her good race. “I have a scratch calendar and I won this morning,” Voigt said. “Otherwise I only ever win one euro, and this morning it was five.” Of the 60 starters, only the winner Jeanmonnot and Alina Stremous (18th place, Republic of Moldova) managed to achieve the perfect score, who – like the 19th year-old Julia Tannheimer from Ulm – a race to catch up was successful. After finishing 28th in the sprint pursuit, Tannheimer finished 17th.
Voigt himself has also had a difficult time, a deep mental hole. “It felt like I was lying on the couch a few weeks ago, unable to put one foot in front of the other, and now I’m back on the podium in the World Cup,” said Voigt. She “feels a lot of gratitude to those who were really with me even in the hard times.”
Even in Hochfilzen, no one has thrown in the towel or anywhere else for a long time. Finally, on Sunday, the women’s and men’s relays are on the program in Hochfilzen. Once again rifles will be armed, muzzles will smoke, sticks will break. The ski hunters are going on the hunt again, and stadium announcer Steinacher will be cheering them on.
#Biathlon #Hochfilzen #Vanessa #Voigt #Franziska #Preuß
