A sea of ​​flags with a white cross on a red background swirled towards her when Lara Gut-Behrami reached the finish area at the Super-G in St. Moritz on Sunday.

Because much would not have been missing, and the Swiss woman would have needed the red cross on a white background.

That is why the cheering of the audience sounded more with the impression of relief and not the enthusiasm like the day before, when Lara Gut-Behrami had won the first Super-G of the weekend in the same place.

This time, in view of the racing, it seemed like the bigger victory that the 30-year-old local hero reached the arena on the Corviglia mountain on skis - albeit upright with a long black coat instead of crouched in a skin-tight racing suit.

Achim Dreis

Sports editor.

  • Follow I follow

The Super-G world champion had fallen violently shortly before trying to round off the weekend with a double victory. After she came down to the valley on the closest possible line and with an intermediate best time, she briefly lost traction in a compression on the "Engiadina". Instead of following the route in the 90-degree bend to the left, it rushed straight ahead towards the safety fences at around one hundred kilometers per hour. Although Lara Gut-Behrami was able to reduce the pace a little after 14 years of the Speed ​​World Cup thanks to her enormous experience, she still broke all the lines of the red safety nets and after a double rollover fell behind in the fall area.

The race had to be interrupted for a while after it had started 40 minutes late due to strong gusts of wind despite the bright blue sky. Whether the lightweight Lara Gut-Behrami was also a little blown away by the wind could not be determined at first. Thanks to her ability to take, she was able to ignore the rescue sledge after overcoming the first moment of shock.

As expected, the victory in the Super-G on this sunny Sunday went to the Italian camp. However, it was not the favored Sofia Goggia who, after her three victories in a row at the speed races last week in Lake Louise and second place on Saturday, could not match another success this time. The downhill Olympic champion raced towards the goal with full attack as always, but on the route, which was 20 seconds shorter than the previous day, she didn’t get around the corners as nimbly as one is used to from her. In the end, Sofia Goggia had to acknowledge 0.75 seconds behind her teammate Federica Brignone, who was the fastest in this sprint race in 57.81 seconds and won just 0.11 seconds ahead of Elena Curtoni,who was the second Italian to decorate the podium. Third place was, like the day before, the American all-rounder Mikaela Shiffrin, who underlined her ambitions to win the overall World Cup again with an impressively clear performance.

For Lara Gut-Behrami, however, the weekend held another chapter in her on-off relationship with the World Cup course in St. Moritz. Even if she can no longer hear it herself, part of the Ticino's skiing history is the fact that she achieved her first podium here at 16 and her first World Cup victory at 17. On the other hand, at the 2017 home World Cup, which was overloaded with high expectations, she only managed to win a bronze medal in the Super-G before tearing a cruciate ligament during training. She is now reacting slightly annoyed to the “special relationship” with St. Moritz that has been said to her over and over again.

On Saturday, despite poor visibility, she had a dream run in her specialty discipline, in which she won on the original track in 1: 19.82 minutes just ahead of Sofia Goggia and with a large margin of 1.18 seconds over Mikaela Shiffrin.

On Sunday she was lucky enough to have come down to the valley healthy.