Just a short two weeks after the Ski Jumping season opener is over, the organisers in the Eastern German town of Klingenthal do not have a lot of time to calm down and breathe: In exactly 24 days, the Vogtland Arena has to be ready for the next World Cup event: the first Nordic Combined competitions of the new year 2016.

While the jumping hill has still been in use since the World Cup and teams from Switzerland and the Czech Republic have been training there, all focus now goes to the preparations of the cross-country track. A two-kilometre track has to be filed with about 10.000 cubic metres of snow. As usual, start and finish of the track will be right in the outrun of the jumping hill.

Alexander Ziron, who is in charge of the event, explains the challenges for the immediate future: „The snow production for this amount of snow takes about 10 days in which we need temperatures slightly below zero degrees.“ As the required amount of snow is about three times as much as for just preparing the jumping hill, renting above-zero snow making equipment or buying additional snow is out of the question as the costs would be astronomically.

Forecasted continuous rain is an additional worry for the organisers. Ziron: „This will surely leave traces on the hill and we’ll need some additional cubic metres of snow.“ Nevertheless, he is optimistic that the OC in Klingenthal can also master the weather conditions for the second World Cup of the season. „Extreme conditions have become normal for us. At the moment, we are still completely relaxed. For the Ski Jumping opener, we were facing a heap of rubble 12 hours before the first competition jump and we made it in the end. So there is no reason to despair over 20 days before the first training of the Nordic Combined athletes.“