Winter Olympics 2022 - Ryoyu Kobayashi out to make ski jumping’s popularity explode in Japan with Beijing statement

Ryoyu Kobayashi is having the ski jumping season of his life — but he knows his achievements so far will pale into relative insignificance in his homeland of Japan if he does not land Olympic gold. The 25-year-old goes into Beijing 2022 as one of the favourites for a medal — but his path to gold could be blocked by Germany’s World Cup leader Karl Geiger or triple Olympic champion Kamil Stoch — though doubts remain about the Pole’s fitness.

Ad/> It has been a stunning campaign so far for Kobayashi, who fell just short of completing a second clean sweep in the Four Hills competition (having achieved that in 2018-19), but a fifth placed finish in Bischofshofen was not enough to stop him winning the overall title — his third in the space of four years. Ski JumpingLindvik dominates ski jump in Zakopane16/01/2022 AT 17:29 He is effectively neck and neck with Geiger at the top of the World Cup standings, sitting just three points behind the German, and goes into the Games as the man in form having topped the podium at one of the events in Willingen.

As Eurosport's Pete Sharland explains when tipping who will shine in Beijing, Kobayashi is the «ultimate definition of poetry in motion in his sport.» All of this is incredibly impressive — but Kobayashi knows other sports rival his in Japan for attention. Perhaps serving as a prime example of home advantage, there has never been a Japanese ski jump gold medallist outside of hosting the Games in their own country.

In the two Olympics Japan has hosted — Sapporo 1972 and Nagano 1998 — six individual medallists were crowned. /> Away from home, there have been just three individual Japanese medallists — Hirokazu Yagi at Lake Placid 1980, Noriaki Kasai at Sochi 2014 and bronze for Sara