The warm winter weather has taken its toll on the Nordic Combined World Cup this year and so many teams went in search of snow to at least keep the training level on a high standard. Many of them found such conditions at the Nordic Combined TRIPLE venue of Seefeld which just received the first snowfalls of the winter a little earlier. It houses athletes from Germany, France, Japan, Norway and the Czech Republic at the moment, next to the local heroes of the different Austrian training groups.

The Czech team has been training at Seefeld since the 4th of January and next to Tomas Portyk, Petr Kutal and Martin Zeeman, Miroslav Dvorak who was sidelined due to mononucleosis earlier this winter, joined the team again.

„The conditions are excellent“, Czech head coach Vladimir Smid reports. „We have had camps in Harrachov and Austria focussed on strength and endurance, so we mainly came here to jump. Initially, we jumped from the K-70 but moved to the K-100 on other days.“

Smid was pleased with Dvorak’s performance coming out of his period of sickness: „Although it was last September that Miroslav stood on top of a jumping hill the last time, he was quite successful in Seefeld. He has shown promising performances but we have to be careful not to rush his return. He would have started in the next World Cup event but even though his cross-country performance is also looking quite well, it’s mainly just about sucking in the competition atmosphere for him.“

Source: fis-ski.com