Stuhec emulates Maze, historic bronze for Vonn
Ilka Stuhec reproduced her impressive World Cup form to maintain Slovenia’s grip on the world downhill title when she won gold in the blue riband event in St Moritz yesterday. Stuhec, with four World Cup victories to her name this season (three downhill and one superG), timed 1min 32.85sec down the 2.6km-long Engiadina course to emulate the feat of retired former teammate Tina Maze two years ago in Beaver Creek. Unheralded Austrian Stephanie Venier took silver - just her second podium, at 0.40sec, while Lindsey Vonn made history when she claimed bronze (+0.45), her seventh world medal. Vonn, the 2009 world downhill champion, showed all her experience to produce a strong bottom section to secure third place and become the oldest medallist, at the age of 32 years and 117 days, in any women’s event at the World Ski Championships. The previous record was held by Austrian Anita Wachter when she won giant slalom bronze in 1999.
Hitting speeds of 80kph within four seconds of leaving the start gate and motorway-coasting maximums of 125.6kph, the race was held in ideal conditions with none of the fog that had seen the men’s downhill on Saturday rescheduled to run after the women’s.
Stuhec had shown her mettle down the course by topping two of the training sessions and finishing second in the downhill section of the combined, in which she fluffed by crashing out of the slalom six gates in. She started no differently yesterday, attacking the downhill from the off, running with start number seven. Sheer speed allied with technical mastery of the tricky, turny part of the bottom section of the slope guaranteed that the 26-year-old Slovene topped the podium to carry on Maze’s legacy.
GOGGIA’S COSTLY MISTAKE
For a terrible mistake two gates from the finish line, Italian Sofia Goggia, a remarkable ninetime World Cup podium finisher this season, would also have been on the podium here.
She eventually missed it by just seven-hundredths, capping a couple of miserable days for the Italian who was first after the combined downhill but bombed out of the slalom after just three gates. “Being fourth in the world champs is nothing,” lamented Goggia. “It’s hard to accept with the mistake I made because I was pretty fast before. It hurts bad.”
Austrian Nicole Schmidhofer failed to live up to her billing after winning the super-G. Starting with bib number one, she came in 16th, 1.76sec off the pace, while silver medallist in that discipline, Tina Weirather of Liechtenstein, was 10th (+1.18). The race unfortunately had two highprofile absentees in the shape of Austrian Anna Veith and home star Lara Gut, whose mouthwatering head-to-head with Stuhec and Vonn had been touted as one of the stand-outs of the worlds held high in the picturesque Engadin mountains. Gut was ruled out for the season after suffering a bad knee injury in training for the slalom section of Friday’s alpine combined event, a cruel blow for the Swiss team for whom the 25-year-old has become a standard bearer, especially in the speed events. Veith pulled out of the downhill saying she was not ready in her comeback from a knee injury. — AFP