Cornelia Hütter took the downhill ranking from Lara Gut-Behrami. The Styrian won the last World Cup race of the season on Sunday with an all-out attack, the Swiss only ended up in 17th place.
It was a great success for the ÖSV women, because four of them, Christina Ager (+0.50/4th), Stephanie Venier (+0.62/5th) and Mirjam Puchner (+0.63/6), landed in the top 6 at the World Cup dress rehearsal. Ilka Stuhec (SLO) came second and Nicol Delago (ITA) came third. Hütter set the best time with starting number 12, Gut-Behrami followed with 14, fell behind, 1.89 seconds behind, and had to hope that someone else would snatch the victory away from the Styrian in front of 8,450 spectators. Things got very exciting again during Stuhec’s ride, the Slovenian came within 17/100 of Hütter.
But we had to tremble right up to the end because runners at the top always had the best times. When Gut-Behrami fell out of the top 15 and there was only one athlete left at the top and Hütter could have taken second place, she breathed a sigh of relief in the collective ÖSV cheers.
Gut-Behrami leaves with the three crystal balls for the overall World Cup, Super-G and giant slalom. For the ÖSV women, it is the first in the speed profession since Nicole Schmidhofer in the downhill in 2019.
The trainers’ request for a start time of 9 a.m., where the conditions would have been ideal, was not fulfilled because the TV broadcast would have clashed with that of the ski flying in Planica. When it was time to start at 11:15 a.m., the wind had already picked up, which is why some gates were replaced with individual poles because of the flickering flags. This resulted in a delay of almost 15 minutes.
After start number two we stopped again because a slider had fallen and had to be treated. As the bad weather front approached, it became increasingly dark, but it didn’t become the wind lottery we had feared. The Norwegian Ragnhild Mowinckel ended her career in 20th place.
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