Italian skier Marta Bassino made the first major surprise at the World Alpine Skiing Championships in Courchevel and Meribel after winning the gold medal in the women’s super giant slalom. In this way, she brought Italy a second gold of the championships in France, where two days ago Federica Brignone triumphed in the Alpine combined.
Marta Bassino made the most of her giant slalom skills to win the title today. The Italian giant slalom specialist was fastest in the final two sectors, which were quite technical and reminiscent of a giant slalom.
In them, Marta Bassino managed to win by a full 0.41 sec over Mikaela Shiffrin (USA), who failed to maintain the same speed as the Italian in the final meters and finished 0.11 sec behind her. In the upper two sectors, the American opened a lead of 0.30 sec, which turned out to be insufficient, and so she was left with silver.
In shared third place were the representatives of Norway and Austria, Kajsa Vickhoff Lie and Cornelia Hutter, who finished 0.33 see behind Marta Bassino. Ragnhild Mowinckel (Norway), who leads the World Cup Super-G slalom standings and was tipped as one of the favorites today, was just 0.03 sec behind the two.
In this group was also the Olympic champion in the discipline from Beijing 2022 Lara Gut-Behrami (Switzerland), who, like Mikaela Shiffrin, was very strong in the upper part of the course, but made a mistake when entering the technical section. In the end, the Swiss, who today defended her world title from Cortina d’Ampezzo, finished in sixth position with a delay of 0.37 sec.
Somewhat reassuringly for her, quite a few other riders, including Federica Brignone, Sofia Goggia, and Tessa Worley, made the same inaccuracy entering the technical section of the track. These inaccuracies were dictated to some extent also by a change in the illumination of the course in that very area where it entered from the sunny to the shady part, which did not allow them to recognize a bump that formed shortly after the descent of Marta Bassino, which started with #8.
