Anna Fenninger kisses
the skis that took her
to her first World Cup
downhill podium.
Riesch, who at the last downhill outing in Val d’Isere recorded her worst
finished downhill result (24th) since 2007, got back on track but continued to
look for winning speed with a fourth-place finish.
With two second-place results and two victories, Vonn hasn’t missed a downhill podium all season and climbed 50 points closer to Riesch, who led 883 to
747. Riesch said she was nervous coming into the race after missing a gate
during the final training run and now trailed Vonn in the downhill standings by
103 points.
With her 37th career win, Vonn stands alone in fifth place all-time among
women World Cup winners, breaking a tie with Katja Seizinger. Next is Paerson with 41 wins.
Hinting at her speed to come the next day, Gut finished sixth in the downhill
as she worked out the rust from a suspension for making critical comments
about the Swiss team’s head coach in St Moritz.
American Julia Mancuso, a super combined champion in Zauchensee in
2007, laid down a smooth run that was good enough for 16th place. She was
the only other American to score as Stacey Cook and Leanne Smith finished
34th and 37th, respectively. Alice McKennis missed out on the race and will sit
out the rest of the season after breaking the tibia plateau of her left leg while
training a week before the race.
Britt Janyk led the Canadian women in 15th place to follow up her 13th in
Val d’Isere after a poor start to the season (39th, 43rd, 33rd) at home in Lake
Louise.
At five feet two inches, 19-year-old Swiss star Lara Gut has to look up to
most of her World Cup competition, but, with the help of the top tier of the
Zaunchensee super G podium, it was Gut standing tall at day’s end.
Gut, who missed last season with a hip injury, shrugged off the slap on the
wrist (a two-race suspension) handed down from Swiss-Ski to beat second-place Vonn by more than half a second (0.53).
“I had time to watch all the others,” said Gut, who hadn’t returned to the top of
a World Cup podium since her first win in 2008 at 17 (the same year she won
a pair of Worlds silver medals). “I saw where they made mistakes so I knew
where to be careful. “It was not perfect, but I went out attacking and had just
a few errors.”
Vonn, who won the season-opening super G in Lake Louise in early December, had her fourth mid-course save of the season after flying horizontally
