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BANSKO
Tina Weirather is having the best season of her career and pulled in her fifth podium of the year.
“I had to really push the line
and take a lot of risk from there
down,” said Vonn. “It was a little
bit more direct than I had inspected. I would have liked to
have not risked quite as much,
but it worked out.”
The win, which took Vonn
within seven points of sealing
the season super G title (which
would be her third this season
as she has already secured the
downhill and super combined
globes), also meant another
entry in the history books. Vonn
eclipsed retired Austrian great
Renate Goetschl as the most
winning women’s super G racer
in World Cup history with 18 victories in the discipline. Vonn’s super G point total climbed to 413 points. Only Austrian Anna
Fenninger, now 94 points behind, could possibly stop Vonn from winning the super G globe.
After winds had claimed the previous day’s downhill (the seventh women’s race to be either
canceled or rescheduled by adverse weather this season) Italian Daniela Merighetti got the
field of competitor’s attention with a gutsy run in the No. 2 bib.
Seven starters later, this season’s breakout speed racer, Liechtenstein’s Tina Weirather,
bumped Merighetti out of her second win of the season by just two-hundredths of a second.
The podium remained unchanged as the next eight racers struggled on the technical course
the World Cup tour hadn’t visited since 2009 until Vonn’s harrowing run.
“I tried to give myself a lot of direction for that gate because I was on a pretty bumpy sidehill
and I just hit one of the bumps funny, and I went shooting downhill in the opposite direction
that I wanted,” said Vonn of her near fall. “I was way off line and had to chuck it sideways, but
thankfully the pitch was pretty steep and I was able to accelerate out of that mistake.”
No other woman was within a quarter of a second of the top three, all of whom are rolling with
huge success on this season’s speed tour. Vonn has just about sealed the overall title and continues to climb past the half-century mark with her 51st World Cup victory. Weirather, the 2007
World Juniors downhill champion, has taken her racing to a new level this season with the first
five World Cup podiums of her career. Merighetti, a 12-year World Cup veteran, won her first
Lindsey Vonn skis over the last
jump in the Bansko super G
before taking her fourth super
G win of the season.
