Champ Shiffrin prepares to bounce back in Kronplatz
Sablikova races to be fit for Games
MILAN, Jan 22, (Agencies): World Cup leader Mikaela Shiffrin will be looking to bounce back into winning mode ahead of the Winter Olympics in Tuesday’s giant slalom in Kronplatz, Italy.
Shiffrin has dominated the start of the season with ten World Cup wins but had mixed fortunes in nearby Cortina d’Ampezzo over the weekend despite a promising third place in Friday’s downhill.
The slalom specialist finished seventh in the second downhill on Saturday in the Italian Dolomites and failed to finish Sunday’s Super-G. But she is confident of laying the groundwork ahead of the Pyeongchang Olympics, starting on Feb 9, on the challenging Erta slope.
As US speed skater Shani Davis prepares to take to the ice at the Winter Olympics in South Korea, the one thing he knows is that the passage of time has not dimmed his appetite for success.
At 35, Davis is headed to his fifth Olympics where he will take part in the 1,000m and 1,500m, and irrespective of what he achieves in South Korea next month, he can look back with pride at a glittering career in which he has twice won Olympic gold.
The Chicago native topped the podium in the 1,000m in Turin in 2006 and took silver in the 1,500m. He defended both medals at the 2010 Games in Vancouver, but suffered heartbreak at the in Sochi four years ago.
After recovering from a training crash which left him needing 62 stitches, American snowboarder Shaun White is backing himself to win the halfpipe gold in Pyeongchang next month even though he will be facing off against rivals who grew up idolising him.
White, 31, burst onto the scene at the 2006 Turin Games where he won the first of his two Olympic golds, becoming the face of the sport globally.
But he faltered in Sochi in 2014, finishing a disappointing fourth in halfpipe, and last October he needed more than five dozen stitches after crashing in training.
Seventeen-year-old American snowboarding prodigy Chloe Kim is enjoying the media frenzy surrounding her first Olympics, where her status as favourite to win gold in halfpipe has made her among the most talked about athletes heading into the Games.
“It’s really fun,” she told Reuters after finishing second in the US Grand Prix in Mammoth Mountain.
US men’s slopestyle skiers Nick Goepper and Gus Kenworthy will both be returning to the Olympics next month after qualifying for the team during competitions on Sunday in Mammoth Mountain.
Goepper qualified during the first final of the day, which was also a World Cup event, when he finished eighth and no other Americans made the podium.
Czech speed skater Martina Sablikova has had injections and is still battling pain in her back which she hopes will not harm her chances at next month’s Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
The long-distance specialist has a problem with a disc in her back, which makes it difficult for her to completely stretch her leg and while she had painkilling injections, decided to miss the European Speed Skating Championships earlier this month to focus on the Games.
“I want my back to get fully in order and I can tell myself in Korea that I’ve done all I could,” she told Czech media when she announced her decision to skip the European Championships in Kolomna at the start of January.
Britain’s 1980 Olympic figure skating champion Robin Cousins says he will be ‘freaking out’ in the commentary box when ice dancing duo Penny Coomes and Nick Buckland perform in Pyeongchang.
Patriotism and nerves aside, the 60-year-old who will be at the Games in South Korea as both British team leader and BBC television pundit believes the pair could do better than expected.
Britain has not won an Olympic medal in the sport since 1994, when Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean took bronze 10 years on from enchanting the nation with ice dancing gold at the 1984 Sarajevo Games.
After the heartbreak of missing out on the Winter Olympics in Sochi by the narrowest of margins four years ago, Canadian speed skater Jordan Belchos is all set to step it up a gear when he takes to the ice in South Korea.
The Toronto native missed the cut for Sochi by a few hundredths of a second and is still pinching himself after being selected to race for Canada in the 10,000m and the team pursuit at next month’s Winter Games.
The list of injuries suffered by Canadian snowboarder Mark McMorris in a freak accident at the end of last season would be enough to put some people off the sport for life.
Riding in the back country with his brother Craig in March, the then-23-year-old caught an edge as he took off for a jump and spiralled into a tree.
McMorris broke his jaw and left arm, ruptured his spleen, suffered a pelvic fracture, rib fractures and a collapsed lung.
The injuries were so severe that McMorris feared he might lose his life.
Gus Kenworthy and Nick Goepper each made the US Olympic slopestyle team by finishing second and third in the season’s final qualifying contest — the same order they came in four years ago at the Sochi Games.