SR Staff Report
CORTINA D AMPEZZO,ITALY,21.JAN.23 – Ilka Stuhec.
Photo: GEPA pictures
CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Mikaela Shiffrin’s pursuit of a record-breaking 83rd World Cup victory is still on hold.
Shiffrin finished seventh, 0.39 seconds behind Slovenian winner Ilka Stuhec in a downhill Saturday on the course that will be used for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics.
Due to the wind at the top of the course, the start was lowered. A course that is usually 90 seconds in length was 25 seconds shorter. Less time on the course usually means fewer issues.
The race was officially wide open. It didn’t take long to learn who would fill the void. Yesterday’s second place finisher, the Slovenian skiing with bib eight, Ilka Stuhec, skied with the same precision and balanced transitions that put her in contention yesterday. Skiing immediately after Stuhec, Italian Elena Curtoni did her best to provide the crowd with a home-country winner but arrived at the finish 0.34, late. She would end the day on the podium in third.
One racer before bib seven, Sofia Goggia, Austria’s Nina Ortlieb crashed, delaying the start of the queen of speed.
Goggia lost control while landing a jump, got twisted around, slammed through a gate and slid down the mountain before quickly getting up and skiing down to the finish, where she waved to the crowd to say she was OK.
The safety air bag under Goggia’s racing suit inflated during her crash, which may have helped soften her crash landing.
“I really just made an error. It wasn’t a concentration lapse,” Goggia said. “It went well in that nothing happened.”
Goggia broke two fingers in her left hand during a downhill in St. Moritz, Switzerland, last month, then returned after a quick surgery to win another downhill a day later. She also crashed nastily in a super-G last weekend in St. Anton, Austria, but avoided injury.
“Blow after blow but tomorrow I’ll race,” Goggia said.
It wouldn’t be until bib 30 that we would find out who would be second. Norway’s 24-year-old Vickhoff Lie Kajsa shocked the finish area by finishing only +0.26 behind Stuhec. When she greeted Stuhec at the finish, the Slovenian admitted that she had her worried. Lie Kajsa has her first downhill podium to go with a super-G runner-up in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 2021.
Short races tend to decrease the time differential among the field, and today, that was the case. The time spread from third place to seventh was only 0.05 of a second. Curtoni was only 0.01 ahead of Switzerland’s Lara Gut-Behrami and Norway’s Ragnhild Mowinckel, who tied for fourth.
Mikaela Shiffrin won the first sector but then lost time to finish seventh. While only 0.05 behind third place, as the old saying goes, “hundies matter.” Her teammate Breezy Johnson would have preferred to start from the top to take advantage of her courage, but she skied well and finished the day tied for 10th.
USA’s Isabella Wright skied well again, but struggled in sector three and finished the day in 16th. Her teammate Keely Cashman, bib 41, took advantage of the day to score her first World Cup points of the 2022-23 season, finishing 27th. Cashman has been unable to find the top 30 until today.
A super-G will complete the Cortina weekend on Sunday.
Analysis of fastest three, top 30 Americans, and top 30 results
Top thirty Cortina January 21st downhill results
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
This is a developing story, stay tuned for updates.
