Dhe best comes last: The badly battered German downhill skiers made amends in an impressive way at the season finale and wrote a small chapter in ski history with the first double podium in over 31 years. Romed Baumann and Andreas Sander surprisingly finished second and third in the victory of Austrian Vincent Kriechmayr in Soldeu in Andorra.
Two German skiers in the supreme discipline on the “podium” – that was last on January 11, 1992. At that time, the later double Olympic champion Markus Wasmeier won in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the former world champion Hans-Jörg Tauscher was third. The last DSV athlete among the top 3 in a downhill was Thomas Dreßen when he won in February 2020 in Saalbach-Hinterglemm in Austria.
For Baumann, who was only nine hundredths of a second short of his third World Cup victory, it was the first podium in the World Cup since February 2015. Ten days after his debut on the podium, Sander (+0.13) finished second in the Aspen Super-G again among the top three. Sander’s coup “inspired him and showed that we can do it,” said Baumann (37). “I started with exactly that attitude,” he added. His start number one was “certainly an advantage”, “but you have to use that first”.
Sander (33) reported that after overcoming material problems he felt “extremely well. Luckily I was able to show that again in the race.” At the World Championships in February, the second in the 2021 title fights missed the medal ranks just as far as Baumann, who had won Super-G silver two years earlier.