Jansrud wins first World Cup downhill of season
Stuhec shines in Montreal
VAL D’ISERE, France, Dec 3, (Agencies): Kjetil Jansrud of Norway won the season’s first World Cup downhill on Saturday, a day after his victory in super-G.
Jansrud was 0.26 seconds faster than Peter Fill of Italy, the defending World Cup downhill champion, down the 3.4-kilometer (2-mile) Oreiller-Killy course.
Aksel Lund Svindal was third, trailing 0.33 behind teammate Jansrud. Svindal was runner-up on Friday on his comeback from a 10-month injury absence.
“It’s an amazing beginning,” said Jansrud, who won the season-long downhill title in 2015. “You never know, but I hoped for sure for a start like this.”
For the second straight day, Norway and Italy filled the podium and the traditionally powerful Austria team struggled.
No Austrian placed in the top 15, with lower-ranked starters still racing. Olympic champion Matthias Mayer was the bestplaced Austrian in 17th, 1.45 slower than Jansrud.
“It’s a terrible day,” Austria team director Hans Pum told The Associated Press. “In the last 40 years I can’t remember many like this. We have to analyze exactly what has happened.”
Austria’s winless streak in the marquee downhill discipline extended to 13 races since Hannes Reichelt won at Kvitfjell, Norway, in March 2015.
Austrian star Marcel Hirscher, the fivetime defending overall World Cup winner,
Semen Pavlichenko, of Russia, celebrates his second place finish in the men’s Luge World Cup race on Dec 2,
in Lake Placid, New York. (AP)
will seek to restore pride in a giant slalom on Sunday.
Val d’Isere hosted a World Cup downhill for the first time in 10 seasons.
The French resort took over a three-race weekend meeting which was cancelled at Beaver Creek, Colorado, because of lack of snow.
Slovenia’s Ilka Stuhec won the seasonopening ladies downhill at Lake Louise on Friday with the first World Cup victory of her ski racing career.
The 26-year-old Stuhec stunned the favorites by clocking a winning time of one minute, 45.48 seconds to claim the first of two downhills this weekend at the mountain resort in the Canadian Rockies.
“I knew I could ski fast and I just needed to put it in a race and I did,” said Stuhec, whose best previous result on the World Cup circuit was a fourth place in the 2013 super-G in Beaver Creek, Colorado.
The second downhill is slated for Saturday followed by a super-G race on Sunday.
Italy’s Sofia Goggia was second with a time of one minute, 45.70 seconds, while Sweden’s Kajsa Kling finished third with one minute, 45.79 seconds.
The pre-race favorite, Lara Gut of Switzerland, settled for a time of one minute, 46.17 seconds and a fourth place finish.
Gut, who failed to earn a single World Cup point during last week’s races in Vermont because of a bad fall, now sits in sixth in the overall race with 150 points.
Stuhec was a surprise winner Friday after starting from the 29th position.
American Mikaela Shiffrin is in first place in the overall with 338 points. She tied for 18th in Friday’s downhill with a time that was almost two seconds slower than Stuhec. But this is the first World Cup downhill for Shiffrin who has dominated in slalom the past few seasons.
Sara Takanashi and Yuki Ita took the top two spots at the season-opening women’s World Cup ski jumping event at Lillehammer on Friday.
Takanashi, the three-time overall World Cup champion, claimed victory with 271.3 points, based on the night’s best jump of 99.5m.
German teenager Anna Rupprecht third place, her first podium spot.
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