KILLINGTON, Vt (AP) — Victory eluded Mikaela Shiffrin once again in a World Cup giant slalom at Killington, edged into third place by an Italian 1-2 led by Marta Bassino on Saturday.
Bassino sealed a first career World Cup win by retaining her first-run lead to beat Federica Brignone by 0.26 seconds. Full results are here.
“Celebrating together with Federica fills me with even more pride,” said Bassino, whose teammate was first to greet her and hug her in the finish area. Brignone won this race last year.
Shiffrin was a further 0.03 back in third for a fourth straight top-five finish in GS at the Vermont venue without taking the win.
Still, the three-time defending overall World Cup champion extended her standings lead with a third podium finish to start the season. She also leads the giant slalom standings after two races.
“I felt pretty good with my skiing in both runs so, yeah, I’m pretty happy with the day,” Shiffrin said.
Shiffrin is favored to win a fourth straight Killington slalom on Sunday. NBC Sports’ full weekend broadcast schedule of World Cup Alpine skiing is here.
Brignone dedicated her podium finish to a friend, named Edoardo, who died “just hours ago” before the race in an avalanche on Mont Blanc on the border of France and Italy.
“My thoughts are with him,” said Brignone, who put down the fastest second run to rise from seventh.
Bassino is a former junior world champion in giant slalom, who had four previous third-place finishes on the World Cup circuit. She also placed fifth at the PyeongChang Olympics, where Shiffrin won and Brignone took bronze.
“I finally put together two runs,” Bassino said. “I tried to focus just on myself and to ski like I know how. Then I saw the green light and I thought, ‘Wow.’
“I hope this can be a turning point for my career. I knew I had a result like this in me, I just needed a spark to transform what I do every day into gold.”
Bassino clocked under 50 seconds in bright sunshine for each run which was shortened due to gusting winds at the scheduled start higher up the mountain.
Alice Robinson of New Zealand, who won the season-opening giant slalom last month at Soelden, Austria, failed to finish the first run, racing the day before she turns 18.
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For the first time, the world’s top-ranked female cross-country skier is an American.
Sadie Maubet Bjornsen claimed the yellow bib awarded to the World Cup overall standings leader by placing third and fourth in the opening races of the season in Finland the last two days.
No American woman previously led the standings at any point in a World Cup season, according to U.S. Ski & Snowboard. Bill Koch won the men’s title in 1982.
Maubet Bjornsen, a two-time Olympian who got married in July, finished third in a classic sprint (by one hundredth of a second) on Friday. Then she was fourth in a 10km classic race on Saturday, missing the podium by 1.3 seconds.
She earned 83 World Cup points for those results, eight better than Russian Natalya Nepryaeva, last season’s No. 2 skier in the overall standings. There are still more than 30 races left this season, which runs through March. Maubet Bjornsen is better at classic races, and seven of the next eight races are freestyle.
Maubet Bjornsen was 14th in last season’s standings, 1,069 points behind champion Ingvild Flugstad Oestberg of Norway. Four different Norwegians combined to win the last six World Cup overall titles.
Kikkan Randall and Jessie Diggins, who teamed to win the U.S.’ first Olympic cross-country title in PyeongChang, are the only American women to finish a season in the top three of the standings. Randall was third in 2013; Diggins second in 2018.
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Ten years ago, a nurse practitioner told a crying Kyra Condie that climbing wasn’t that important. Condie needed back surgery for severe idiopathic scoliosis, which could have ended her sport climbing career at age 13.
“Turns out, climbing IS pretty important to me and it was that moment that made me choose a different surgeon,” was posted on Condie’s social media.
She underwent 10-vertebrae spinal fusion surgery to correct a 70-degree curvature the following March.
“I’m lucky I did [the surgery], because his approach was to fuse less vertebrae and leave me with more mobility which has been crucial to my climbing,” was posted on Condie’s social media.
That decision led Condie on a path that, on Friday, hit a milestone marker — qualifying for the first U.S. Olympic sport climbing team. Condie earned her spot by reaching the final of an Olympic qualifier in Toulouse, France.
She is the third American to qualify for the sport’s Olympic debut in Tokyo, joining Brooke Raboutou and Nathaniel Coleman. One more man can make the U.S. team at a Pan Am qualifier in three months.
Condie is a Twin Cities native who graduated from the University of Minnesota last year and recently moved to Salt Lake City. She was 25th at the world championships in August.
Overall, 26 athletes have qualified for the U.S. Olympic team across all sports. A full roster is here. The team will eventually eclipse 500 athletes.
Olympic sport climbing will feature one set of medals per gender, the event combining three disciplines: lead, speed and bouldering.
From Tokyo 2020: Speed climbing pits two climbers against each other, both climbing a fixed route on a 15-meter wall at a 95-degree angle. Winning times are generally between five and eight seconds. In bouldering, climbers scale a number of fixed routes on a four-meter wall in a specified time without safety ropes. In lead climbing, athletes attempt to climb as high as possible on a wall measuring over 15 meters in height within a fixed time with safety ropes.
The sport debuted at the Youth Olympics in 2018 in Buenos Aires, but no Americans were entered.
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November 30, 2019 at 10:58AM
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