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12/27 10:39 CST Austrian skier Scheib takes World Cup GS for her 3rd win of the
season. Shiffrin places 6th
Austrian skier Scheib takes World Cup GS for her 3rd win of the season.
Shiffrin places 6th
SEMMERING, Austria (AP) --- Skiing in front of her home crowd. Winning the
race. And going top of the discipline standings.
Julia Scheib could have hardly wished for a better scenario to wrap up her
calendar year 2025, just weeks before the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.
The Austrian won a World Cup giant slalom on home snow near capital Vienna on
Saturday, beating Switzerland's Camille Rast by 0.14 and Olympic champion Sara
Hector of Sweden by 0.40 seconds.
Mikaela Shiffrin, the women's record holder with 22 GS victories, finished
sixth.
"It's crazy, I never thought it would be the win. It was so tough, it was so
bumpy, and I was so relieved when I came into the finish," said Scheib, who was
two-hundredths behind Hector after the opening run.
In the final run, Scheib trailed then-leader Rast until the final split but had
a perfect finish section.
"It's amazing. I heard the crowd before I (skied) into the last section, I
heard the crowd, and I thought I had to let the skis go," Scheib said.
Alice Robinson, Scheib's main rival in GS, skied out in the first run, enabling
the Austrian to overtake her and enter the Olympic year with an 88-point lead
in the discipline standings, having won three of the five GS races this season.
A two-time winner this season, Robinson clocked the fastest intermediate time
in the opening run before she lost her balance and slid off the course in a
left turn.
"I got unlucky and off balance and I pressured in a bad spot and just went face
flat," Robinson said. "I am really disappointed not to be walking away with any
points."
Shiffrin, who won the race in Semmering near capital Vienna four times between
2012 and 2022, finished 1.45 seconds behind Scheib.
Dominating slalom this season with four wins from as many races, Shiffrin is
still trying to regain her form in GS, more than a year after suffering a deep
puncture wound in her side and severe trauma to her oblique muscles in a bad
crash at a race in Killington, Vermont.
"So far this season, the second run, that was maybe the biggest test for me. I
was really quite scared, actually," said Shiffrin, referring to the afternoon
darkness on the mountain's shadow side.
"I knew it would be bumpy from the first run and I didn't really feel after the
first run that I could tackle this again," said the American, who stood eighth
after the opening run. "So I changed the mentality on the second, just to try
to be as smooth and like soft on the surface as possible. So it wasn't going to
be the most fast skiing, or like not the most powerful turns, but it felt much
more manageable on the second run."
The American star, the 2018 Olympic champion, has not been on a giant slalom
podium in her past 10 races --- the longest streak in her career since the
first 15 GS races of her career without top-three result in 2010-11.
Shiffrin's teammates Nina O'Brien and Paula Moltzan both had nasty-looking
crashes. O'Brien slid off the course in the first run and Moltzan fell and hit
her head on the snow in the second run, but both apparently avoided injuries.
Before the season, the Austria women's team had not won a World Cup giant
slalom for more than nine years. Scheib ended the draught last October at the
season-opening race, also in Austria, and added another victory in the most
recent GS in Tremblant, Quebec, three weeks ago.
And while her three wins make her a strong medal contender for the Feb. 15
Olympic giant slalom race, Scheib already had bigger plans.
"I want to continue like this, but I want also to focus a little bit on
super-G," she said.
Hector, the reigning Olympic GS champion, was chasing her first victory in
nearly a year. The Swede has seven career World Cup wins, all in giant slalom,
but has not triumphed since winning a race in Slovenia in the first weekend of
January.
"Julia skied really well, I stepped on the brakes a little bit, you cannot do
that," Hector told Austrian TV.
A slalom on the same hill is scheduled for Sunday.
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AP skiing: https://apnews.com/hub/alpine-skiing
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