After the split thirteenth place in the jump, Portyk moved up to eleventh place in the group, but at the end of the ten-kilometer run he lost and finished twentieth with more than two minutes.
Leading man after the jump, the Japanese Ryota Yamamoto maintained a lead of more than half a minute in only the first of four circuits. Then the Austrian Lukas Greiderer and the Germans Julian Schmid and Johannes Rydzek caught up with him. Yamamoto tried to keep them, but he couldn’t accept the pace, and eventually dropped to fourteenth place.
Schmid dropped out of the top three, and a mile and a half before the finish line, Rydzek stepped in, who developed a visible lead and seemed to be going for gold. But then he completely ran out of energy. In a slight ascent to the stadium, a group of pursuers swept past him, losing sixteen seconds after 8.5 kilometers in the meantime. Geiger finished for gold, which is his first individual medal at a big event.
At the same time, he went to the race practically from quarantine and from the eleventh place after the jump. “The last few days have been pretty upside down, but I felt really good today,” said the 25-year-old Geiger. “You must never give up. I don’t know how it actually works, but it’s unbelievable,” added the German teammate, who had a 1:26 minute loss at the start of the running part. Norwegian Jörgen Graabak finished just behind him, Greiderer won bronze. On the contrary, the tired Rydzek crossed the finish line with a loss of more than twenty seconds to fifth.
The former junior world champion Portyk attacked the individual maximum under five laps during his third Olympic participation, but in the end he narrowly lagged behind the nineteenth place from the race on the 2018 Grand Bridge. On the middle bridge, however, he improved by four places compared to the last Olympics.
“I take it positively. At the beginning of the season, I couldn’t imagine that I would race here, so 20th place is nice,” said Portyk, who had almost a four-month outage in preparation for the Olympic season due to general fatigue. “It was quite running today. There are no such distances on the small bridge, so it was hard. By the end I was running out of strength, I was there on the rope, on the rubber. Now I’m just looking out the big bridge. I’m looking forward to flying there and then the run will be a little easier for me, “added the Czech number one.
Lukáš Daněk, who improved by four places, passed the finish line 26 seconds later. Jan Vytrval took 26th place and Ondřej Pažout was 29th.
