Switzerland’s Lara Gut-Behrami bagged a second world championship gold

Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, Feb 18 (AFP/APP): Switzerland’s Lara Gut-Behrami bagged a second “unbelievable” world championship gold as she edged hot favourite Mikaela Shiffrin to the women’s giant slalom title in Cortina d’Ampezzo on Thursday.

American Shiffrin had been fastest down the first leg, but Gut-Behrami turned on the afterburners on the second run to clock a winning combined time of 2min 30.66sec. It was a third medal in the Italian Dolomites for the 29-year-old Swiss racer after winning gold in the opening super-G and bronze in the downhill.

Shiffrin claimed silver down the Olympia delle Tofane course, at just two-hundredths of a second, to add to her super-G bronze and combined silver in Cortina. Austrian Katharina Liensberger, who won joint gold in the parallel giant slalom, took bronze (+0.09sec) in a scintillating race held in beautiful sunny conditions.

“GS has always been important for me my entire career and I always knew if I was skiing well in GS then it’s easy to be fast even in the other disciplines,” said Gut-Behrami. “I’ve been struggling a lot through the last years and this year I was coming back step by step. “Last week I had pressure and I knew that I could do really well and was just not trying to think about that. I was tired.”