Skiing great Hirscher an Olympic champion
JEONGSEON, South Korea — Eventually, The Question began to bother Marcel Hirscher.
It wasn’t so much the actual content, which was always some variation of: “Do you need an Olympic gold medal to validate your otherwise perfect skiing career?” He was certain he knew the answer: “No.” It was more the incessant echo of it, over and over.
How often did Hirscher hear The Question? “Ev-e-ry day,” he said. This was offered with a smile Tuesday, because that line of inquiry never again will arise. As of the Alpine combined event at the Pyeongchang Games, Hirscher is, at long last, an Olympic champion.
The 28-year-old Austrian used a sublime slalom run on an icy course to rise from 12th after the opening downhill in the tworun competition and added that Winter Games triumph to a substantial collection of accolades. He already owned a record six consecutive overall World Cup titles and four individual world championship golds.
“I’m super happy, because now this stupid question has gone away,” Hirscher said, before adding with gusto, “Now The Question is Zzzzzzztt. Deleted.”
Hirscher finished in 2 minutes, 6.52 seconds, which made him 0.23 second faster than silver medalist Alexis Pinturault of France. Another Frenchman, Victor Muffat-Jeandet, was third, more than a full second behind Hirscher.
France hadn’t had a had a topthree finish in a men’s Olympic combined race in 70 years, let alone a pair of medals on the same afternoon. It might never happen again, either: There is a movement afoot to drop the combined from the Olympic schedule because the International Ski Federation, race organizers and broadcasters instead want more short, TV-friendly parallel racing events where skiers go down the piste two at a time, head-to-head.
“I’m disappointed to see it go away,” said Sasha Rearick, head coach of the U.S. men’s Alpine team, expressing an opinion voiced by several others. “It’s been a good event for us for many reasons. It’s the one thing that brings the tech and the speed together.”
Fitting, then, that a race considered the greatest test of versatility in a sport of increasing specialization was how Hirscher finally got his gold.
As recently as two weeks ago, he said, he wasn’t even sure whether it was worth entering the combined, in part because it would steal training time away from his better events and also because he hadn’t been on downhill skis in a year.
So Hirscher went into the downhill merely hoping to be within three seconds of the lead going into the slalom; he wound up less than a second and a half behind, the beneficiary of catching a lull in swirling winds — the same gusts that had led to the postponement of the first two races on the Alpine schedule.