Gatt/Schöpf with first World Cup victory in Austrian triple triumph

Innsbruck (FIL/03 Dec 2022) Red-white-red party atmosphere also prevailed at the first race of the men's doubles of the new season, where nobody knew where he really stood due to the new, lower and wider double sleds. The 21-year-olds Juri Gatt and Riccardo Schöpf showed two equally strong runs and took the first World Cup victory of their career, ahead of their teammates Steu/Koller (+0.079 sec.) and Müller/Frauscher (+0.083 sec.). It was the first ever triple triumph for the Austrians and was well celebrated at the finish line.

Plagued by injuries during the last two winters, the Tyrolean Thomas Steu and Lorenz Koller showed with track record of 39.387 seconds in the first run that the victory at their home World Cup will only be awarded through them. In the second run, however, they got stuck at the start and had to surrender to a narrow defeat in the end. Third-placed Yannick Müller and Armin Frauscher turned on the turbo in the second run and still made it onto the podium from seventh place.

Overall World Cup winners Toni Eggert and Sascha Benecken of Germany finished fourth, 0.106 seconds behind, closely followed by their teammates, six-time Olympic champions Tobias Wendl and Tobias Arlt (+0.133 sec.). As expected, the young Latvian duo Martins Bots and Roberts Plume, who are now flying the Latvian flag after the retirement of Andris and Juris Sics, presented themselves strong in sixth place. South Tyroleans Ludwig Rieder and Patrick Rastner set a new start record in both runs and finished tenth in the end.

Quotes:

Juri Gatt: “We tried to stay as cool as possible after the first run, but it wasn't easy. We never thought that our first World Cup victory would come out of this. It's sensational and cool. I don't know what to say. We are all friends in the team, help each other, work together and then the triple success is even more sensational because we are extremely happy with each other.”

Riccardo Schöpf: “It was cool. While we were squatting at the top at the start, I saw that Müller/Frauscher were leading. We had already said before how cool a one-two-three would be and that we wanted to get it this year. We knew then that this was our chance and we had to perform. It's unbelievably great that a one-two-three has now actually come out of this. I'm almost more happy about that than about the World Cup victory.”

Tobias Wendl: “We are quite satisfied with the runs. We raced stably, we haven't raced that well in Innsbruck for a long time. Because the whole system is safer now, everyone else is also riding better. You could see that hardly anyone was shaking, and the statics were not on our side. In the first run it went reasonably well, we grabbed the light barrier with our hands, but in the second we went down too far to the left and then you're missing three hundredths right away.”

The results of the 1st Men's Doubles World Cup of the 2022/23 season are available at the following link: https://www.fil-luge.org/de/ergebnisse/eberspaecher-weltcup-19