Pinturault dominates combined - before it goes extinct

Alexis Pinturault realises that the Alpine combined event is moving toward extinction. Maybe that's why he's dominating the races that remain.

The Frenchman secured another combined win when first-run leader Dominik Paris straddled a gate toward the end of his slalom run on Friday.

For his seventh World Cup victory in the discipline, Pinturault won with a 0.42-second advantage ahead of Peter Fill of Italy.

Kjetil Jansrud of Norway finished third, 0.45 back.

Combined events — which determine the winner by combining the times from one downhill run and one slalom leg — are on the provisional calendar only for the next two seasons. After that, the International Ski Federation has intimated that it plans to install more TV-friendly parallel events instead.

This season already, both the men's and women's circuits have had giant slalom and slalom paral- lel events in Alta Badia and Courchevel, France, respectively. Also, city events on miniature slalom courses are planned for Oslo on New Year's Day and Stockholm on Jan. 30.

In the combined, the top around racer often wins.

Pinturault stood 19th after the downhill run — 1.65 seconds behind Paris — but had the fastest slalom leg to post his 21st career win across all disciplines.

Paris was positioned to duplicate his victory in the downhill a day earlier when he held an advantage of 0.46 ahead of Pinturault at the last checkpoint of the slalom leg, but the Italian lost control about 10 gates from the finish.

Jansrud is also a supporter of the combined, citing the event's long history. But he's aware that that a one-hour parallel race is more attractive to TV viewers and easier to understand than a complicated combined event that can take all day. all-