Feuz wins second Kitzbühel downhill in 3 days
KITZBÜHEL, Austria, Jan 24, (AP): For the second time in three days, Beat Feuz triumphed in a race that he had unsuccessfully tried to win for a decade.
The Swiss skier won this weekend’s second men’s World Cup downhill on the Streif course Sunday, repeating his victory from two days earlier.
The back-to-back wins came after Feuz, who first raced here in 2010, finished runner-up in the traditional race four times in the past five seasons.
No Swiss skier had won Austria’s signature ski race since Didier Cuche earned the last of his five victories here in 2012.
Sunday’s race was interrupted for a few minutes because of flat light as low clouds moved in just before Feuz was set to start.
Not distracted by the additional waiting time, he excelled mainly in the bottom part of the course as he beat Johan Clarey by 0.17 seconds.
The Swiss 2017 world champion trailed Clarey’s time by 0.42 midway through his run before he mastered the final section.
The 40-year-old Frenchman became the oldest skier on a downhill podium in the 54-year history of the World Cup.
In the final training session Thursday, Clarey crashed at full speed into the boarding near the finish, but he escaped unijured and finished fourth in the race the next day.
Austria’s Matthias Mayer, who won the race last year and came runner-up to Feuz on Friday, finished 0.38 behind in third. Working their way back from injuries, Christof Innerhofer placed fourth and his Italian teammate Dominik Paris, who has won the race three times, finished seventh.
While Friday’s race on the same course was marred by bad crashes involving Swiss skier Urs Kryenbühl and Ryan Cochran-Siegle of the United States, only three of 52 racers failed to finish Sunday’s downhill and all avoided injuries.
Organizers had lowered the final jump, where Kryenbühl crashed in Friday’s race, which had been rescheduled from another iconic resort, Wengen in Switzerland.
As skies cleared again in Sunday’s event, some late starters had clearer visibility and came close to the times of the top-ranked racers, most notably Florian Schieder.
The Italian, wearing bib No. 50, led Feuz by more than a quarter of a second for the first four splits but ultimately finished 1.43 seconds behind in 14th.
Meanwhile, Lara Gut-Behrami mastered a tricky World Cup super-G on Sunday where several top racers were caught out at two jumps.
On a picture postcard minus-3 Celsius (27 Fahrenheit) day in the Swiss Alps, home favorite GutBehrami finished 0.93 seconds faster than Tamara Tippler. Federica Brignone, the defending overall World Cup champion, was 1.02 back in third.
Gut-Behrami now has 14 of her 28 career World Cup wins in the super-G discipline that demands speed, technical skills and an ability to improvise through unfamiliar gates. Unlike in downhill, racers do not train on the exact course-setting.
Five of the top 20 highest-ranked starters skied out or were disqualified Sunday, including Sofia Goggia who won downhills on the Mont Lachaux slope the previous two days.
Goggia, the 2019 world championship silver medalist in super-G, missed the second-last gate after nearly crashing out while landing the jump in sight of the finish line. She reacted to the error by holding her helmet in her hands in the finish area.