It felt like the passing of the crown. The United States’ Lindsay Vonn, most successful female alpine ski racer in history, made everyone here in Are and around the world watching on TV gasp when she crashed in today’s Super G race right after her “heir apparent” and fellow U.S. ski racer Mikaela Shiffrin “came, saw and conquered” this historically close race. Only five hundredths of a second separated the three medal winners and Vicky Rebensburg of Germany missed the podium by a mere two hundredths.
Behind new world champion Mikaela Shiffrin, Italian Sofia Goggia won the silver, and Switzerland’s new big-speed talent Corinne Suter took the bronze climbing onto the podium for the first time in her young professional career.
Like yesterday, sunshine and clear skies with freezing temperatures greeted the athletes. The track presented itself in perfect condition, but the temperatures were even colder than yesterday.
Swiss racers Wendy Holdener and Corinne Suter pointed out that the colder weather made the track even faster and caused them to adjust their race tactics accordingly.
Some of the defeated favorites now look forward to their next chance in Saturday’s downhill.
“The entire team here in Are (race track builders, slip crews, support staff on the hill and each and every volunteer) are doing a fantastic job”, a smiling and thankful Ragnhild Mowinckel from Norway said.
“It’s fantastic to be here and I feel so welcomed. Thank you, thank you, thank you”, an enthusiastic Ilka Stuhec from Slovenia added.
While Italy had a very strong showing with four racers in the top ten, Austria’s best athlete Nici Schmidhofer had to settle with the eleventh position. In the post-race press conference Sofia Goggia pointed out that the necessity of lowering the start due to strong wind at the top may have caused the race to be much closer than expected. The top ten contestants were separated by only little more than half a second.
Winner Mikaela Shiffrin stated that she was quite surprised to see the green light in the finish area and that she didn’t expect to top the leaderboard in her first event already.
“Even though I made a small mistake towards the end of the course, I felt how well the skis were going and I thought that I still had a chance to finish very fast. Whatever my serviceman put on these skis today, I’ll tell him to do more of that for the next races”, Mikaela laughingly told the gathered press.
Lindsay Vonn spoke to the media after the winners’ press conference and gave an emotional and very personal account of past, present and future of her exceptional career. Asked what she would miss most after her retirement, Lindsay said:
“I’ll miss that wonderful sensation of speed that you can get only by racing down a hill on a pair of skis. I don’t know yet how I will compensate for that because I won’t be able to do it skiing privately without my ski pass being taken away from me.”
Lindsay looks forward to having children one day that she can go skiing with. With a twinkle in her eye, she made sure that her boyfriend, NHL hockey player P.K. Subban, caught that statement as he was listening to the press conference through Lindsay’s mobile phone.
Wednesday will be the men’s turn to tackle this exciting Super G course. The race is scheduled to start at 12:30. Fans from around the world are invited once again to cheer on their heroes at the Swedish National Arena or along the racetrack.