Beaver Creek (United States) (AFP) – Swiss star Marco Odermatt won the Beaver Creek downhill in commanding style on Thursday to notch his third victory in four starts in the young alpine World Cup season geared toward the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in February.
Odermatt, who failed to finish the first run of the giant slalom at Copper Mountain last week in a rare mistake for him, bounced back with a brilliant win on the Birds of Prey course just a few kilometers further west in the Colorado Rockies. The 28-year-old four-time reigning World Cup overall champion clocked 1min 29.84sec to finish 30-hundredths of a second ahead of American Ryan Cochran-Siegle, with Norway’s Adrian Smiseth Sejersted third, 69-hundredths of a second back.
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Odermatt, the four-time defending World Cup overall champion, claimed his 48th World Cup victory, adding it to the giant slalom win Soelden and a super-G win at Copper Mountain this season. He sealed the victory on the challenging second sector of a course shortened at the bottom due to lack of snow in November.
After unusually warm temperatures threatened the Beaver Creek events, heavy snowfall predicted for the weekend prompted organizers to move the downhill to Thursday and the super-G to Friday, with a giant slalom still scheduled for Sunday.
Odermatt claimed his first Beaver Creek downhill victory, after runner-up finishes in 2022, behind Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, and in 2024, behind teammate Justin Murisier. “A first victory in downhill (at Beaver Creek) so very excited for that,” he said. “It was for sure a little bit different from than other years … for me, a perfect race, a very, very good steep part.”
Odermatt took his tally atop the overall standings to 300 points, 134 ahead of Austrian Marco Schwarz on 166. Norway’s Henrik Kristoffersen is third on 158 points. Kilde finished an impressive 11th in his first downhill since a serious fall at Wengen in January 2024. The Norwegian, who required multiple surgeries on knee and shoulder injuries complicated by a bout of sepsis, had returned from his near two-year injury absence at Copper Mountain last week.
© 2024 AFP
