COURCHEVEL – Canadian skier James Crawford beat Aleksander Aamodt Kilde by a hundredth of a second to win the gold medal in the men’s Super-G at the World Championships on Thursday.
Alexis Pinturault finished 0.26 seconds back to take bronze, two days after the Frenchman won the combined race at the World Championships in his hometown.
Crawford was the next starter after Kilde, one of the pre-race favourites, took the lead in the race.
Crawford was halfway behind the Norwegian but mastered the final leg to win the race for Canada’s 11th medal at World Championships and fourth gold. The last Canadian winner was Erik Guay, who won Super G gold six years ago.
“I definitely wasn’t expecting anything today,” Crawford said. “It was consistency from top to bottom. I pushed out of the gate with a very clear idea of where I wanted to be, what I wanted to ski.”
It was Crawford’s second major event medal after winning bronze in combined at last year’s Beijing Olympics.
He led the combined event at the 2021 World Championships with the fastest time in Super-G but fell back to fourth place after the slalom. He was also fourth in the Olympic downhill a year ago.
Crawford is yet to win a World Cup race but has three podium results, most recently at a downhill in Italy in December.
The silver was Kilde’s first career medal at Worlds. The Norwegian won Super-G bronze and combined silver at the Olympics a year ago.
Marco Odermatt, who dominates the World Cup as the defending champion, won four of the six Super-G races this season but finished fourth, 0.37 seconds behind.
Odermatt is still awaiting his first World Championships medal, five years after the Swiss won five golds at the 2018 junior championships.
The route was technically demanding with some difficult corners in the steep middle section, but also rather short with running times of just over 1 minute 7 seconds.
Flat lights made it difficult to see the bumps, but as the race progressed the sun reached more parts of the L’Eclipse track.
Defending champion Vincent Kriechmayr finished more than eight tenths off the pace and outside the top 10. The Austrian, Odermatt and Kilde are the only skiers to have won a Super-G in the World Cup in the past two years.
Matthias Mayer won the Olympic title last year but the Austrian retired in December. American racer Ryan Cochran-Siegle, the Olympic silver medalist, finished 1.52 seconds off the leader.
Italian skier Dominik Paris had a nasty fall after skiing through a gate. He got up but later limped in the finish area.
The Italians wore black armbands following the death of Elena Fanchini, the skier whose career was cut short by a tumor and who died on Wednesday aged 37.
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