Queenstown racer achieves career best

QUEENSTOWN skier Willis Feasey has achieved his career best World Championships result overnight, finishing in 28th place in the FIS Alpine Ski World Championships Super G.

This is Feasey’s “best result at World Cup/World Champs level” of his 13year FIS Ski Racing career.

‘‘I am pretty happy . . . I know there is a couple of sections where I can clean up and be even faster so there is that part of me that always wants a little bit more, but I am happy with my result,” he said.

Super G consists of just one run where the athlete puts it all on the line.

Feasey explained that the course was “turny, dark and bumpy” with a technical and steep top section and a highspeed jump into an aggressive turn.

The Covid19 pandemic meant that the usual test events held on a slope before a race of this calibre weren’t held.

“It’s a pretty interesting course because noone has really skied on it before. People were pretty unsure coming into it and either hadn’t skied on it or had only done a couple of training runs, it was pretty unknown for everyone”.

Vincent Kriechmayr, of Austria, took the top spot in a time of 1 min 19.41sec with Romed Baumann, of Germany, just 0.07 seconds behind. Alexis Pinturault, of France, the current World Cup leader, rounded out the podium in third.

The FIS Alpine World Ski Championships are held once every two years. Snow Sports NZ Head of Alpine Jono Howson explained that the World Champs was a standalone event and titles were held for two years until the next FIS Alpine World Championships.

Feasey will be in the start gate again on Monday when he competes in the Alpine Combine race which consists of one run of Super G and one run of Slalom, with the times combined.