Bakuriani Ski Jumps
The Soviet ski jumping complex in the Georgian Caucasus, seven hills rebuilt in 1969 for international competition; the two big ones have not been jumped since 1983 and stand derelict above a resort that is otherwise booming.
- Region
- Samtskhe-Javakheti
- Country
- Georgia
- Status
- partially abandoned
- Year opened
- 1934
- Year closed
- 1983
- Reason for closure
- The international programme ended. Bakuriani held world-level ski jumping competitions from 1971 to 1980, and the K110 and K88 hills were last used in 1983; with the Soviet training system gone there was nothing to sustain hills of that size, and only limited domestic activity has taken place on the smaller jumps since 2011.
History
The Sakartvelo jumping complex stands on the edge of Bakuriani, the resort town in the Lesser Caucasus that was the winter playground of the Soviet Georgian establishment. Ski jumping here goes back to the mid-1930s - the jump archive dates the first structure to 1934, other accounts to 1935, when a K40 was built to start a youth training programme - and in 1969 the site was rebuilt entirely as a seven-hill complex, the largest of them a K110 and a K88. International competitions ran from 1971 to 1980. The hill record on the K110 is 115.5 m, set by Sergei Zontov in 1971 and matched by Finland's Veli-Matti Ahonen in 1983, which was also the last year either big hill was used. Of the seven, the K110, K88, K15 and K10 are out of order, the K25 has been destroyed, and only the K55 and K35 still see use - Artur Sarkisiani jumped 58.0 m on the K55 in February 2021 - with activity otherwise limited since 2011. The contrast with the town below is sharp: Bakuriani hosted the 2023 FIS Freestyle Ski and Snowboard World Championships and has had new gondolas, snowmaking and lift connections built, while the concrete inruns of its Soviet jumping past sit unused on the hillside alongside the ruins of a Soviet spa camp. Georgia straddles the conventional Europe-Asia boundary and is filed here under Asia following the UN geoscheme, though ski federations generally treat it as European.
Runs
- K110 large hill
- K88 hill
- K55 hill
- K35 hill
- K25 hill
- K15 hill
- K10 hill
Sources and further reading
Location
41.7427, 43.5414