SAALBACH, Austria (Reuters) – Switzerland’s overall champion Lara Gut-Behrami added a third Alpine skiing World Cup crystal globe to her season’s haul after taking the women’s super-G title in the Austrian resort of Saalbach on Friday.
Gut-Behrami clinched the overall and giant slalom titles last Sunday and can still end the year with four globes, with the downhill set for Saturday.
She finished seventh in the season’s final super-G, won by Czech skier Ester Ledecka, to secure the title in the discipline with 30 points more than Italian Federica Brignone, second in the race with Norway’s Kajsa Vickhoff Lie third.
“I’m so happy, super proud about that. Super-G is the discipline I really love and so to win the globe again is unbelievable,” said Gut-Behrami, whose title was her fifth in super-G.
“Today has been a challenging race… I enjoyed the skiing, it’s incredible that they were able to manage to have a course like that because it’s so warm, it’s been raining and it was good to ski.”
Gut Behrami can become only the fourth female skier to take four globes in a single season, a feat previously achieved by Americans Mikaela Shiffrin and Lindsey Vonn and Slovenia’s Tina Maze.
The Swiss leads the downhill standings, 19 points clear of absent Italian Sofia Goggia who broke her tibia last month, and 68 and 72 ahead of Austrians Stephanie Venier and Cornelia Huetter.
Ledecka’s super-G win, with a run 0.28 quicker than Brignone down the Ulli Maier piste, was a first since February 2022 for the 2018 Olympic champion.
Huetter ended up third in the standings after finishing fifth.
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin in London, editing by Toby Davis)
Source Agencies
