COURCHEVEL, France (AP) — Swiss skier Marco Odermatt won gold in the boys’s downhill Sunday for his first profession world championships medal.
Odermatt had a flawless run on the demanding L’Eclipse course to beat Aleksander Aamodt Kilde by 0.48 seconds because the Norwegian added to his silver from Thursday’s super-G.
Cameron Alexander finished 0.89 behind to take the bronze for Canada’s second medal of the worlds after teammate James Crawford had won the super-G.
Odermatt let loose a number of screams after posting the fastest time. He had not won a medal in eight previous starts at senior world championships, after winning five golds on the 2018 junior worlds.
“It was definitely something I’d never felt before, this scream on the finish,” Odermatt said. “Also, those two minutes during Aleks’ run, I used to be shaking throughout my body like never before.”
Odermatt is the defending overall World Cup champion and is dominating the circuit again this season, but had not won a downhill race before.
His gold medal got here three days after he finished fourth within the super-G, an event by which he was heavily favored after winning 4 of this season’s six World Cup races.
“The fourth place from three days ago makes this gold even nicer,” Odermatt said.
Super-G winner Crawford stood third for some time in Sunday’s race before his time was beaten by his teammate Alexander and by Austria’s Marco Schwarz, who finished four-hundredths of a second off the rostrum in fourth.
It’s the primary time since 2015 that the Austrian men’s team did not medal within the marquee event of the world championships.
Defending champion Vincent Kriechmayr lost his likelihood of a medal as he struggled within the Trou Noir (Black Hole), where racers land a jump at nighttime shade and can’t see the tracks and bumps of the course.
“It was a great run but you have got to race error-free here, and I didn’t manage to try this. All in all, just not ok,” Kriechmayr said. “Odermatt had the right run, of course.”
The beginning of the L’Eclipse course is within the sun, but racers soon enter a lengthy shaded middle part through a forest before coming out within the sun again for the finish.
On one other vivid day within the French Alps, the sunshine didn’t affect the race prefer it had done in the ladies’s downhill Saturday, when the sun began beaming down on the Roc de Fer course in Meribel and appeared to break down the course and slow the later starters. Odermatt’s victory made it a Swiss downhill double after Jasmine Flury won the ladies’s race.
The race was interrupted for 20 minutes after Brodie Seger awkwardly landed a jump and apparently hurt his right knee. The Canadian needed to be taken off the hill on a stretcher and was flown to hospital by helicopter.
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