SAALBACH, Austria (Reuters) – Austria’s Cornelia Huetter seized the women’s downhill World Cup title in the final race of the season on home snow in Saalbach on Saturday, denying Switzerland’s Lara Gut-Behrami a fourth crystal globe.
Behrami had already won the overall, giant slalom and super-G titles and was bidding to become only the fourth woman to take four globes in a season, a feat previously achieved by Americans Mikaela Shiffrin and Lindsey Vonn and Slovenia’s Tina Maze.
Huetter, who had been third overall and 72 points adrift of the Swiss going into the race, tore up the script with a lightning run down the Ulli Maier piste to win in one minute 45.08 seconds from 12th on the starting list.
Gut-Behrami, starting 14th, was 1.89 seconds slower and ended up only 16th, losing out by 28 points with Italian Sofia Goggia third in the final standings despite being absent due to injury.
Slovenia’s Ilka Stuhec finished second in the race, 0.17 slower than 31-year-old Huetter, with Italy’s Nicol Delago third and 0.49 off the pace in warm conditions.
Gut-Behrami could still take comfort in the achievement of being the first Swiss female skier since Vreni Schneider in 1995 to win three different globes in a single season.
The downhill win was only the second of Huetter’s World Cup career and the crystal globe was her first.
The race was also a farewell to Norway’s retiring Ragnhild Mowinckel, the 2018 Olympic downhill silver medallist. She finished 20th and last.
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin in London, editing by Pritha Sarkar)
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