The second station of the FIS Nordic Combined Continental Cup USA tour was hosted by the upcoming FIS Junior World Ski Championships organizers in Whistler (CAN).
On 18./19. March two Individual Gundersen competitions were on the program for the Nordic Combined men.
The weekend started with a surprise right away, when only four nations were entered with Austria, Germany, Italy and the USA. However, since at least five nations must start in order to carry out a COC, Nathaniel Mah, who had ended his active career two years ago, returned from retirement at short notice in order to add another nation to the starting list with Canada.
With the longest jump of the day at 101.5 meters and 130.4 points, Thomas Rettenegger was in the lead after the Ski Jumping round on the HS 105 in the Whistler Olympic Park.
Second place went to Nick Siegemund (101 m, 126.6 pts), who started the 10 km run 15 seconds behind the Austrian.
His German Wendelin Thannheimer (96.5 m, 119.3 pts) finished third, 44 seconds behind the leader and tied with Marc Luis Rainer (97 m, 119.3 pts) from Austria.
In an exciting cross-country race, there was a gripping sprint between David Mach and Rainer on the home stretch, which the Austrian lost by 0.1 seconds.
Mach, who had the fastest skiing time of 25:29.4 min, fought his way up from 6th place after Ski Jumping and secured the first Continental Cup victory of his career.
Behind Rainer, Lange (+1.1 sec) fought his way into third place, just ahead of Wendelin Thannheimer (+1.3 sec), who reached the finish line in a photo finish at the same time as Thomas Rettenegger (+1.3 sec).
