Superpipe star Sharpe in Olympic prep Canucks second and third in skeleton
Freestyle skier from Calgary wins first invitation-only Dew Tour event
You could say Cassie Sharpe anted up in a big way.
With M.O.P.’s Ante Up cranked in her headphones, the 25-year-old freestyle skier claimed her first Dew Tour win Friday in Breckenridge, Colo. She turned a technically difficult second run — right cork 900, left flare, right 360, switch 360, straight air truck driver, left cork 900, right flare — into 93.66 points and a superpipe victory at the invitation-only event.
“It feels pretty good, honestly,” said the Calgary native. “It’s just nice to be at a big event where it’s only invited athletes and to be able to go against the best in the world and be able to persevere and be on top. It feels awesome.”
She has already won on the World Cup tour this year as well, taking gold in New Zealand in September. But she fell back to ninth at Colorado’s Copper Mountain last week and came into the Dew Tour ranked second overall in World Cup points behind Marie Martinod of France.
“It felt good to get another podium under my belt,” said Sharpe, who has been on the World Cup circuit since 2012. “I’m super happy, super proud to be riding the way that I am. The technicality in there of rotating both ways, flipping both ways and riding backwards in the halfpipe all adds up to a pretty technical run.”
Martinod finished second at 92.00 and American Maddie Bowman was third with 90.33 in the eight-woman final.
The original field of 21 included all the usual World Cup podium threats, attracted by prize money and the fact this event was also an Olympic qualifier.
“I had a lot of people asking me how I’m thinking because it was an Olympic qualifier, how that weighed on my mind,” said Sharpe. “But honestly, when I’m at the top of the pipe, I’m not thinking about anything else. I’m not thinking about people looking at me, I’m not thinking of the cameras, I’m not thinking about the potential Olympic significance that it can have.
“I’m just trying to stay focused and in the moment of what I’m doing. Once I land a run and I take my headphones off and I can hear everyone, that’s when I have that moment of ‘whoa!’ ”
The win gives her confidence and a boost for the rest of the season, but she knows how wide open the Olympic competition will be in February. She finished fifth at a test event in PyeongChang in February. IG LS, AUSTRIA Elisabeth Vathje earned silver and Canadian teammate Mirela Rahneva took bronze in a women’s skeleton World Cup race Friday.
Calgary’s Vathje finished with a combined time of one minute 49.38 seconds while Ottawa’s Rahneva finished in 1:49.44. Russia’s Elena Nikitina won in 1:48.80.
It was the third silver medal of the season and second in as many weeks for Vathje, and the first podium of the year for Rahneva. The Canadian duo also shared the podium one year ago at a World Cup in Winterberg, Germany, when Vathje won gold and Rahneva bronze.
Jane Channell from North Vancouver finished 14th.
“The only thing better than sharing the podium with Mimi would be to share it with both Mimi and Jane,” said the 23-year-old Vathje. “I think it shows the strength in our program and we are here to fight. All three Canadians moved up from their spots after the first run and that shows the tenacity in our team.”
Vathje, in third after her first trip down the 1,478-metre chute in Austria, moved up a spot on the podium after clocking the thirdfastest time again in the final heat.
“For me, it is sometimes hard to attack on the first run, so I knew going into the second run I could fight to move up — especially with a push improvement,” said Vathje, who knocked 0.07 off her start time in the second heat. Rahneva was seventh after the opening run before posting the second-fastest second run.
Vathje moved into second spot in the overall World Cup standings. Rahneva sits third and Channell seventh.
Earlier, Latvia’s Martins Dukurs won his 50th career World Cup race with a time of 1:46.03. South Korea’s Sungbin Yun slid to the silver at 1:46.18, while Russia’s Nikita Tregubov slid to the bronze at 1:46.52. Dave Greszczyszyn of Brampton, Ont., was the top Canadian in 14th.
luge podium longtime coming for Canadians
LAKE PLACID, N. Y. Canadian lugers Tristan Walker and Justin Snith earned their first medals of the World Cup season Friday after finishing third in doubles.
Calgary’s Snith and Walker of Cochrane, Alta., were fourth after the first run, but climbed into third after a mistake-free second run to finish with a combined time of one minute 27.683 seconds.
“Having two consistent runs and getting on the podium is something that has been few and far between for us a few years,” said Walker. “It feels really good, especially to do it in Lake Placid.”
Building on a reset in Calgary after a dismal start to the season in Europe where the focus was put on the process and not the results, the Canadians responded once again with the third-fastest time in the second run to grab the final spot on the podium.
Snith and Walker captured their third career doubles podium, but first since 2015.
“This was a really good day. It’s been a frustrating three years since we’ve been on the podium. We know we can do it if we are consistent, but just haven’t been able to put two runs together and get it done,” said Snith, who along with Walker was fourth in doubles at the 2014 Olympics.
German lugers Toni Eggert and Sascha Benecken finished first, extending their series lead and cementing themselves as the Olympic favourites. Austria’s Peter Penz and Georg Fischler were second.
Eggert and Benecken finished more than six-tenths of a second ahead of Penz and Fischler. The margin between the first and second sleds in the race was actually wider than the margin between the second- and 10th-place sleds.
German skier wins shortened super- G
S EL VA DI VAL GARDEN A, ITALY The end of a long drought for the German team could provide a big boost for alpine skiing.
Early starter Josef Ferstl put down a nearly flawless run in a fog-interrupted super- G Friday to become the first German man to win a World Cup speed event in 13 years.
German public TV stations ARD and ZDF often provide the sport with its biggest live TV audiences, influencing calendar decisions and starting times for races.
While Germany has had a standout slalom skier in Felix Neureuther, and Maria Hoefl-Riesch and Viktoria Rebensburg have been highly successful for the women’s team, the men’s speed squad had lacked consistent success since Markus Wasmeier’s achievements in the 1980s and ’90s.
“Looking on the other side of it, the best thing that could happen today was a German win,” Norwegian standout Kjetil Jansrud said after a major mistake took him out of contention. “It’s such a big market and the interest is huge in Germany.... It’s perfect for the sport.”
Erik Guay of Mont-Tremblant, Que., was the top Canadian in 12th. Guay is competing in his first World Cup event of the season after missing the first two with a back injury. Dustin Cook of Lac- SainteMarie, Que., was 14th. Manny Osborne-Paradis of Invermere, B.C., didn’t finish.
Wearing the No. 2 bib, Ferstl required slightly more than 90 seconds to negotiate the Saslong course and finished a slim 0.02 seconds ahead of Max Franz of Austria. Olympic downhill champion Matthias Mayer of Austria came third, 0.10 behind, despite a big mistake.
Later starters struggled as the fog set in. Following numerous delays and interruptions, the race was stopped because of the low visibility after only 38 of 80 racers were able to start their runs. Only lower-ranked skiers were prevented from competing.
Aksel Lund Svindal, who finished ninth, and Jansrud had won the last five super- G’s in Val Gardena, with Svindal taking a record four.
In another tough day on home snow for the Italian team, Christof Innerhofer and Dominik Paris had the worst of the fog, while Peter Fill posted the host squad’s top result in eighth.
It’s been a revival season for the Germans with Thomas Dressen finishing third in a downhill event in Beaver Creek, Colo., earlier this month for the team’s first speed podium since Max Rauffer’s victory in 2004.
Andreas Sander, another German, has had three straight top-10 results in the speed events, including sixth Friday.
“The podium of Thomas in Beaver Creek really triggered something,” Ferstl said. “We realized we could reach the podium.”
Over the past two decades, promising Germans have had their careers derailed by injury.
Florian Eckert won the bronze medal in downhill at the 2001 world championships and then tore up his knee. Tobias Stechert, another promising downhiller, retired this year because of persistent injuries.
“Always when we were very close we had a really, really tough punishment. We thought there were some bad ghosts over the speed team,” German alpine director Wolfgang Maier said. “This is the first generation where we are a little more stable.”
The hiring of Mathias Berthold, an Austrian, as men’s head coach has also made an impact after he surprisingly left the Austrian team after the 2014 Sochi Olympics.