Sun Valley (United States) (AFP) – Italy’s Federica Brignone claimed the alpine World Cup giant slalom crown on Tuesday with a runner-up finish to Lara Gut-Behrami in the season finale at Sun Valley, Idaho. Brignone, who had secured the overall and downhill season titles on Saturday, came into the final giant slalom 20 points behind leader Alice Robinson. But Robinson failed to complete the first leg, and Brignone — who needed only a 13th-placed finish to claim the title — finished with a flourish, notching the fastest time of the second leg to come 14-hundredths behind Gut-Behrami’s total of 2min 10.01sec.
“It’s been a crazy and amazing season for me,” Brignone said. “It’s just incredible. I never thought I was able to ski like that, like this year – to stay focused and to really be on my skis and ski like that. It’s something magical.” It was Gut-Behrami’s second victory of the finals, after her super-G win on Sunday to clinch her sixth season title in that discipline.
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Brignone was second-fastest in the first leg, 45-hundredths of a second behind Gut-Behrami. But she said she thought her chances of contending and capturing a third season title had ended with a “terrible mistake” on the lower section of the first run.
“I lost so much,” said Brignone, who started first on the first run and had stormed through the upper reaches of the course but then had to fight her way to the finish. “I thought I was losing everything, but in the end it was really not an easy course, not an easy setting and slope so everybody made a mistake — especially Alice, and she went out. I don’t know how I could stay in, actually. It was a never give up thing.”
“And then in the second run, I wanted just to go at the finish, you know, but then somehow I wanted also to attack… I wanted to try to win the race. So I was trying to attack, but holding (back) a little bit. When I crossed the finish line, I was already happy. I knew I’d won the World Cup, so I was really happy.”
Robinson had been hoping to become the first New Zealander to win a World Cup globe. But after surviving an early wobble on the first run, she lost her balance on a deep turn on the bottom of the course and couldn’t recover — one of six skiers among the 28 who started that failed to finish the first leg. Brignone, whose overall World Cup title was her first, claimed her second giant slalom globe to go with the one she won in 2020.
Gut-Behrami, who was runner-up in the overall standings, claimed her 48th World Cup victory and her 100th podium since making her debut in December of 2007. “Yeah, 100 podiums — it’s unbelievable,” she said. Sweden’s Olympic champion Sara Hector completed the podium, finishing 80-hundredths of a second back.
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