GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, Germany (Reuters) – Italian Federica Brignone won the women’s downhill at Garmisch-Partenkirchen on Saturday, defeating her compatriot Sofia Goggia by one hundredth of a second to extend her overall World Cup lead as Lindsey Vonn again failed to finish.
The race was halted after Austria’s Nina Ortlieb was airlifted to hospital after crashing and suffering what appeared to be a serious injury on the German resort’s Kandahar piste.
A week after winning the downhill at Cortina d’Ampezzo, Goggia, set the time to beat but 34-year-old Brignone, finished in one minute and 35.83 seconds to claim her fifth World Cup win this season.
Switzerland’s Corinne Suter completed the podium in an extremely close race with 12 skiers finishing within less than a second of the winner.
American Vonn, four-times overall World Cup champion with 82 wins, came out of retirement in November having quit the sport in 2019, but the 40-year-old is still awaiting her first podium finish since her return.
Vonn, who fell in Cortina, failed to finish for the second successive race after missing a gate near the bottom of the course.
Brignone, who now has 32 World Cup wins, had never won a downhill before this season, but her second victory extended her lead in the discipline standings to 29 points over Goggia.
The Italian, second overall last year, also increased her advantage in the overall standings to 110 points over last season’s winner Lara Gut-Behrami, after the Swiss skier came in fifth.
In the men’s downhill at Kitzbuehel, Canada’s James Crawford claimed his first World Cup win, finishing 0.08 seconds ahead of Switzerland’s Alexis Monney, with another Canadian, Cameron Alexander in third.
Marco Odermatt, three-times reigning World Cup overall champion and winner of the super-G event on Friday at the Austrian course, finished sixth, but retained his lead in both the downhill and overall categories.
(Reporting by Trevor Stynes, editing by Ed Osmond)
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