Fast and furious Goggia wins Crans-Montana downhill
CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland: Olympic champion Sofia Goggia marked up a belated first World Cup win of the season in Saturday’s downhill at CransMontana in Switzerland, although a major timing malfunction angered the 26-year-old who was forced to wait several minutes at the start gate.
Downhill specialist Goggia had been sidelined for three months after fracturing her ankle in October, and only made her comeback to the circuit last month.
“I’m happy about the race but not really with my performance or the way the race went with the timing stuff,” said Goggia.
“I was ready to start and they stopped me 10sec before,” she complained.
“But I’m really happy to be here because, I didn’t think I’d make it back so quicky, When I first started training again I felt awful.
“But today I was fast, and my objective for the rest of the season is to do just that, ski fast,” she said.
On her comeback she eked out a couple of runner up positions at Garmisch in January, and these were followed by a super-g silver at the world championships in Are behind Mikaela Shiffrin.
But here the ‘wild horse’ as Goggia is sometimes nicknamed went one better as she won this World Cup race in sunny and warm conditions on powdery snow.
The winner needed patience ahead of her run after the timing devices malfunctioned during Lara Gut’s descent, forcing the star from Bergamo to wait several minutes at the starting gate before racing.
The 26-year-old took the win from Switzerland’s Joana Haehlen who finished second at 0.36sec while Swiss downhill specialist Gut at 0.45sec was eventually awarded third ahead of Nicole Schmidhofer in fourth.
Because of the timing malfunction officials originally gave out flowers on the podium and had identified Schmidhofer as third.
This was Goggia’s sixth career World Cup win and fourth in the discipline.
With two downhills of the women’s season remaining Schmidhofer leads the race for the discipline honours from her compatriot Ramona Siebenhofer.
The race took place in the same resort of Crans-Montana where a spectacular avalanche sent emergency services scrambling in midweek as snow thundered across 300 to 400 metres (yards) of the lower section of the Kandahar piste leaving two meters of compact snow and killing a skipatrol employee. - AFP