On Sunday morning in Courchevel, France, 25-year-old Swiss Marco Odermatt won the downhill of the World Ski Championships, in what was his first victory ever in this specialty, the fastest in alpine skiing. In downhill Odermatt had finished second seven times in the World Cup, the seasonal competition made up of dozens of tests in the various disciplines of alpine skiing, of which he was the winner in 2022.
On the Eclipse track in Courchevel, created specifically for these World Championships, which unlike the World Cup take place in a single location and provide for only one annual competition for each specialty, Odermatt had already skied on 7 and 9 February, in the combined competitions (which alternates a to a more technical one) and super-G (the fastest discipline after downhill). In the combined Odermatt had been eliminated after missing a goal, while in the super-G, in which he had already won four races this season, he finished fourth.
In the downhill test – with 40 gates, for a length of over three kilometers on an altitude difference of almost a thousand meters – Odermatt started with the number 10 backbone, therefore before most of the more highly rated opponents, and ran a described race as close to perfection: without relevant errors, with speed where needed and with great attention and elegance in the final part, decidedly more technical.
(Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
After his descent, all the main rivals still had to ski, but it was already clear that it would be very difficult to do better than him. And in fact only the thirty-year-old Norwegian Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, his main rival in the last two seasons, came relatively close to him, albeit almost half a second late. Instead, all the others arrived much further away from Odermatt and Kilde and yet rather close to each other: all the downhill racers classified between fifth and twenty-sixth place were in fact delayed by between one and two seconds from Odermatt.
Odermatt is not the first skier in history to win a World Cup without having ever won the same specialty in the World Cup before (it also happened to the Italian Marta Bassino) but his victory, after seven second places in his career in the World Cup , has attracted a lot of attention and raised expectations for him. The French Johan Clarey, 23rd in Courchevel and Olympic silver in 2022 in Beijing, said that “Odermatt is the Federer of skiing” because he “manages to do things that are impossible for others”. clarey he added which is not just a physical matter: «in our sport there have been machines, but he is a genius».
(Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
Born in 1997, Odermatt grew up and still lives in Buochs, a town of five thousand inhabitants in the middle of Switzerland, on the west coast of Lake Lucerne. He speaks of it as an “enchanting place”, where his family has lived for generations, and as a place that he has no intention of leaving. Often presented as a pupil of former skier Beat Feuz, his compatriot and winner of three Olympic medals, Odermatt is described as a precocious, fast-growing talent.
He did his first World Cup race in 2016, already finishing in an excellent 17th place at 19 years old. In March 2019 he finished on the podium for the first time and in December 2019 there was his first victory in the super-G in Beaver Creek, Colorado. In 2021 he finished second in the overall standings of the World Cup (in which the points obtained in all alpine skiing specialties are added up) and in 2022 he won it with 1639 points, almost 500 more than Kilde. Also in 2022 Odermatt also won Olympic gold in giant slalom, the discipline in which he has achieved the most of his 19 victories.
Also this year, despite an accident on the Kitzbüehel slope, in the descent of which he had risked a bad fall, remedying with a remarkable rescueOdermatt is firmly first in the World Cup over 300 points ahead of Kilde and more than double the points ahead of the fifth-placed finisher.
Already at these World Championships, of which the last week is about to begin, Odermatt is also the great favourite, much more than he was in the downhill, for victory in the giant slalom race scheduled for Thursday 16 February. So far, even beyond Odermatt, the World Cup has gone very well for Switzerland which is first in the medal table with two golds, one silver and one bronze. The other Swiss gold was won by Jasmine Flury in the women’s downhill and it had been more than thirty years since Switzerland had won the men’s and women’s downhill races in the same year at the Alpine World Ski Championships.
In the medal table of these World Championships – whose women’s competitions are always in France, but in Méribel – Italy is currently in second place, thanks to the two gold medals won by Federica Brignone in the combined and by Marta Bassino in the super-G.
– Read also: The moments of the polygon, in the biathlon