At the end of the World Cup season, snowboard crosser Pia Zerkhold took second place on Sunday in Mont-Sainte-Anne (Canada). Bakuriani’s World Team Championship silver medalist was beaten only by Australia’s Josie Baff in the final, but Zerkhold beat France’s Chloe Trespeuch in a thrilling photo finish for second place. The ÖSV snowboard team thus achieved 31 podium places this winter (eleven wins, 14 second and six third places).
Zerkhold second in snowboard cross
“This result gives me a lot of motivation for the tough preparations in the summer,” said Zerkhold. The 24-year-old from Lower Austria was not only happy about her first World Cup podium place, but also about the end of a long dry spell.
She was the first ÖSV snowboard crosser since Doresia Krings in September 2007 to make it onto the podium in an individual race. Krings had finished third in Valle Nevado in Chile. In the World Cup rankings, Zerkhold improved to ninth place, Kristall went to Brit Charlotte Bankes.
ÖSV men in the beaten field
For the ÖSV men, however, the end of the season was not under a good star. The day’s second, Jakob Dusek, had to give up after his fall in the first race due to hip and groin problems. In the quarter-finals, Andreas Kroh and Lukas Pachner rode in the same heat and were stopped in the fight for promotion by a collision with the Italian Omar Visintin.
For Kroh it was still the best World Cup result with ninth place. Pachner was 13th, Julian Lüftner and David Pickl shared third place in their round of 16 runs in 17th place, Luca Hämmerle ended up in 25th place.
The German Martin Nörl also secured the crystal globe with the day’s victory in front of the American Jake Vedder and the Canadian Eliot Grondin. As the best Austrian, Dusek took ninth place in the World Cup rankings. Olympic champion Alessandro Hämmerle was 17th, although he only contested three of nine races this season.
More more on this in the Snowboard World Cup 2022/23