AUSTRIA - Japan’s four-time World Cup overall champion Sara Takanashi finished sixth in the women’s ski jumping final won by Norway’s Olympic champion Maren Lundby at the FIS World Nordic Ski Championships in Austria on Wednesday.
Takanashi continued to struggle with the timing of her jumps at Seefeld, recording distances of 101.5 meters and 102.0 meters in the normal hill individual event, dropping out of contention and failing to make up for the disappointment of the previous day’s team competition.
“I haven’t found my jump form yet,” said the 22-year-old Takanashi, a member of the Japanese women’s team that finished sixth the previous day.
“I didn’t train enough to feel confident here. I want to work on my jumps and make it back to the podium,” she said.
The only other time Takanashi placed as poorly as sixth at a world championships was when she made her debut at the event in 2011. In five world championship appearances, her best individual result is a second place recorded in 2013.
Lundby, who had jumps of 106.5 meters and 104.5 meters, added her first world title to the 2018 Olympic gold won in Pyeongchang. She finished with an overall score of 259.6 points, which gave her gold by just half a point over German rival Katharina Althaus.
Lundby also leads the World Cup standings, just ahead of Althaus.
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