High form instead of career end

In the summer she was already thinking about ending her career after a mixed preparation for the season, but now Lara Gut-Behrami has started the winter better than ever before. After victories in Sölden and Killington, the Swiss is again the big hunted today and on Sunday in the giant slaloms in Mont-Tremblant, Canada (5/8:15 p.m., live on ORF 1). The Austrians want to continue to catch up in the discipline that has been their Achilles heel in recent years.

With 39 World Cup victories, Gut, who has been competing at the top level of racing for 16 years, is in seventh place in the all-time best list for women. Only one Swiss woman has won more often: ski legend Vreni Schneider (55 triumphs). There is also an overall World Cup victory (2016), World Cup gold (2021) and Olympic gold (2022). “As long as I realize that I have a chance of winning, I will continue,” Gut-Behrami said recently.

Things progressed gradually for the ÖSV women; things were already going well in Killington in the USA with seventh place for Julia Scheib and eleventh place for Katharina Liensberger. In Quebec, pushing is now the order of the day on largely flat terrain; 30,000 fans are expected in the ski resort less than two hours’ drive from Montreal. “It’s about really pushing down the first six or seven gates on the steep slopes, then it becomes really flat. That’s when you have to look for the speed and find it, get into the downhill position, push. The wide line is punished,” says head coach Roland Assinger about the task ahead on the slope that last served as a slope for the World Cup in 1983.

The fastest time in the second round of the Killington giant slalom was a tasty dose of self-confidence for Liensberger. She was at her limit, but this was calculable. “I knew what I wanted to do better from the first to the second round and was able to implement it. I want to continue working with this attitude and this focus.” Therefore, the timing for two more giant slaloms is “very appropriate,” said Levi, who came third in the slalom. However, the individual races are currently not as important as looking at the whole, the Vorarlberg native asserted. “It’s a process, however long it takes. The overall package is consistent, that wasn’t the case last year.”

Things haven’t gone as well as expected this season for Elisa Mörzinger from Mühlviertel, who was dropped from the ÖSV squad in the spring, but achieved a World Cup nomination with strong training performances. In Sölden she was eliminated in the first round, in Killington she did not qualify for the second run in 33rd place. “I hope that the button will open soon,” says the Rohrbacher.

Strolz debut in departure

Johannes Strolz makes his World Cup debut in downhill today (6:45 p.m., live ORF 1) in Beaver Creek. The sensational Olympic champion in the Alpine Combined in 2022 wants to build up a second mainstay in the future alongside the slalom. “I like the route very, very much,” revealed the Vorarlberg native before his premiere on the challenging “Raubvogel” slope. Strolz quickly made friends with his new profession. “It’s a lot of fun. I want to build up a little bit more in downhill and super-G step by step.”

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