Maze is a slaloming success
KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — Tina Maze of Slovenia, a pop star from a bleak mining town with a tiny but prolific ski slope, won her second gold medal of the Sochi Games on Tuesday, powering through snow, rain and fog on the giant slalom course to reclaim her status as the world’s best ski racer.
Maze, who changed coaches less than two months ago after a brief slump, took two flawless trips down the sodden slope for a combined time of 2 minutes, 36.87 seconds, knocking Austria’s newly crowned Olympic super-G champion, Anna Fenninger, into silver status by seven hundredths of a second.
The best American performance came from 18-year-old phenom Mikaela Shiffrin of Colorado, who skied to fifth place in her Olympic debut. Skiing with a smooth precision that looks effortless but is agonizingly difficult to achieve, Shiffrin wobbled on just a couple of the 103 turning gates she wove through in the storm, but the tiny bit of extra friction cost her the 0.23 seconds she would have needed to finish on the podium, where Germany’s Viktoria Rebensburg earned the bronze.
“It boiled down to losing a couple tenths on a couple turns that I didn’t ski as cleanly as other girls,” said Shiffrin, adding a little later, “It’s something I’m going to learn from, and next Olympics I go to I’m sure as heck not getting fifth.”
Shiffrin might not even have to wait until then. She is a gold-medal favorite for the women’s slalom race on Friday, although Maze might be a contender too, given her supreme confidence after winning gold medals both in skiing’s glamour event, the downhill, and its technical cornerstone, the GS.
Maze, a fiercely independent all-rounder, comes from the Slovenian town of Crna na Koroškem, set deep in a ravine near the Austrian border. The town has produced a disproportionate number of Olympians athletes, many of them skiers. Maze, 30, races independently from the Slovenian team, traveling with a small entourage of supporters led by her boyfriend, Andrea Massi.
“I have dreamed about a day like this, even though it is raining,” Maze said on Tuesday. “I knew it wouldn't be easy in GS. We had two weeks of sun and I knew it couldn’t hold on. Even though it’s not perfect weather, it was perfect racing. I don’t care about the rain.”
Maze’s perfectly timed moves suggested she had been training for the giant slalom all winter, but the opposite was true. As a multidiscipline threat on the World Cup tour, Maze spent most of last seven weeks racing downhill and spent only four days training on GS courses since December, according to her coach, Mauro Pini.
Pini took over as Maze’s personal coach on Jan. 5 after Maze seemed to lose her dominant form in the early season. Having previously coached Swiss skiers Didier Cuche and Lara Gut, Pini was working for Swiss television when Maze called him for a halfhour chat that ended in their partnering up just six weeks before the Olympics.
“I jumped into this small team and I tried to not look back,” Pini said. “I’m not interested in what happened before. I tried to turn the ball in a positive way and work day by day for the positive things.”
After winning the first run, Maze waited in a tent, inspired to see Slovenia’s men’s hockey team building toward a 4-0 victory over Austria to advance to the quarterfinals of the Olympic tournament.
Maze, who can be seen online performing “My Way Is My Decision,” a hit single in her homeland, was not the only musician among the 90 competitors from 48 countries on the start list. Vanessa-Mae Vanakorn of Thailand, a world-class violinist, finished 67th — last place, more than 50 seconds behind Maze, but to great fanfare and curiosity.
The U.S. ski team’s Julia Mancuso failed to finish the first run and will leave the Sochi Games with a bronze medal from the super combined. The men’s GS comes on Wednesday, with four American men on the start list: Ted Ligety, Bode Miller, Tim Jitloff and Jared Goldberg.