January 05, 2026

Welcome back to The Ski Saga, where the snow is fine, the inruns are long, and everyone is one equipment check away from learning humility in public.

First order of business: Bischofshofen is upon us, and the men’s Four Hills finale is shaping up like one of those plays where you can already see the ending, but you keep watching anyway because someone might still trip over a metaphor. Domen Prevc has been floating through the Tour with the calm of a man who knows the wind is on his side and the rules committee is (probably) not. He won qualification with a clean 140, and the talk now is less “can he win?” and more “can weather, paperwork, or fate locate the one banana peel on the outrun?”

The Germans, meanwhile, arrived in Bischofshofen like a well-organized family reunion: everybody made it, but somebody’s knee is acting up and Karl Geiger is quietly staring at the long inrun like it personally wronged him in 2009. Still, the headline is that all five DSV jumpers qualified—and Felix Hoffmann is doing it while negotiating with his own kneecap. That’s sport, folks: the mind says “podium,” the knee says “let’s maybe lie down.”

Now, on the women’s side in Villach, Nika Prevc is collecting victories the way some people collect parking tickets: regularly, confidently, and with a certain shrug that says, “Yes, I was here.” She won again, but Austria’s Lisa Eder made it uncomfortably interesting, missing her first win by a mere 2.7 points—close enough that you could hear every hometown relative inhale at once. That whole nearly-there drama is captured in Eder’s narrow miss, while Germany’s Selina Freitag hopped onto the podium and even managed to turn it into a birthday present for the coach in a very wholesome Villach subplot.