From Gold to Crystal
World Cup globes follow Olympic medals
for alpine women BY SHAUNA FARNELL
If anything was starkly evident in the final
races of the season, it was that not a single
woman on the circuit was going to park for
the season with anything less than full throt-
tle down the homestretch.
The Olympics seemed to give the girls a boost
as they went directly from Whistler to Crans
Montana, Switzerland, where gusts hammered
the resort in the heart of the Swiss Alps all
weekend following the Games. The weather
accounted for the cancellation of the final su-
per combined race that would have taken place
on March 5 (meaning that there were only
two total, and that Lindsey Vonn, first in the
Val d’Isere race and third in St. Moritz, would
claim the title) and made for some interest-
ing dynamics on the speed courses. Then, as
the tour tumbled toward Finals in Garmisch,
Germany, there was a mad dash for the finish
of every race. The result? Both pain and glory,
plus a few exciting skids in between.
Crans Montana Downhill, March 6
Alice McKennis started things off for the
Americans in heavy snow on the downhill
course in Crans Montana. Wearing bib No.
4, the youngest member of the U.S. women’s
World Cup team rocketed to the lead in spite
of the conditions. Swiss racer Nadja Kamer
replaced her in the leader’s box but McKen-
nis’s time held up in the single digits for quite
some time; Leanne Smith, wearing bib No. 7,
also fared well. Lindsey Vonn fired down the
course several racers later and — as she so of-
ten tends to do — took the lead by almost a
full second, even as the course became soft-
ened with snow and the first 20 racers were
blasted with headwinds.
Nobody came close to Vonn for quite some
time and as the last of the first 30 starters
made their way to the finish, it looked as if she
was going to win handily. But that’s when the
wind got really schizophrenic.
And some people probably thought they were
hallucinating when Italy’s Johanna Schnarf,
wearing bib. No. 32, sailed do wn the course and
crossed the line a mere hundredth of a second
behind Vonn. That’s right — one hundredth of
a second. Though the Italian got everyone’s at-
tention at the Olympics when she lost the su-
per G bronze medal to Vonn by about a tenth
of a second and was eighth in the super com-
bined, you could count the girl’s World Cup top
10s on one hand prior to Crans Montana. But
there it was. Schnarf truly seemed to have hit
a stride at the end of the season, but some of
the other late starters who ended up popping
into the top 20 realistically had a tailwind to
thank for it.
The woman who landed in third place would
be one of these. Wearing bib No. 35, Switzer-
land’s Marianne Abderhalden, who had only
ever had five scoring results on the World Cup
prior to this race (her best being a 21st in the
2008 super combined in Crans Montana),
finished an astonishing 0.38 seconds behind
Vonn. A handful of others fitting in the catego-
ry of “who is that?” and wearing late start num-
bers landed in the top 20, pushing McKennis
and Smith down the results a ways. But Vonn
