FIS Alpine Skiing World Championships 2023: Women's Super G. Italian alpine skier Marta Bassin and Sofia Goggi (right) are pictured in Méribel on February 8, 2023.
Méribel (France) – Marta Bassinová is the world champion in super giant slalom and won the second title for Italy at this championship in France. Thanks to a great second half of the course, she beat the American star Mikaela Shiffrin by eleven hundredths of a second, who corrected the failure of the combination and won her twelfth medal at the World Championships. Austrian skier Cornelia Hütterová and Norwegian Kajsa Vickhoff Lieová shared the bronze with a difference of 33 hundredths from the winner.
Advertisement'; }
Photo gallery: 2023 World Championships in downhill skiing
Twenty-six-year-old Bassinová has so far collected her greatest successes in the giant slalom. She did not win a World Cup race in super-G, although she was on the podium four times. In Méribel, she followed up on the success of her compatriot Federica Brignone in the combination and won her second title after the previous year's success in the parallel giant slalom.
She triumphed despite not doing well in the opening passage. There she had only the thirty-first time, some competitors were half a second faster. But then she gradually accelerated and dominated the more technical sections in the second half of the track.
Bassinová rode in eighth place, so she had to wait quite a long time before her surprising title was confirmed. “It was really difficult to follow all the girls who were following me because I lost a lot of time in the opening passage. But I think I did really well in the last part,” she confided on the website of the international federation FIS. “It's still a bit unbelievable to me,” she added.
Even the technically refined Shiffrin could not compete with her in the second half. Despite this, the twenty-seven-year-old American completed her medal collection from the super-giant slalom. After gold from Aare 2019 and bronze from Cortina d'Ampezzo 2021, this time she took silver. Her failure from the Beijing Olympics, where she left without a medal, cannot be repeated in France.
People often reminded her of this failure. Especially after the failure in the combination, where she lost the medal a few goals before the finish line. “I had a couple of tough races, everyone was talking about the Olympics. I think I've answered two hundred questions in the last four weeks about whether I'm worried that the world championships will turn out like the Olympics and I'll leave without a medal. And after the combine, everyone was saying, 'That's right. it's like the olympics, is it the same?' I said no, that it just happens,” recounted the female record holder in the number of victories in the World Cup.
That's why she was very happy about today's success. “It's a really, really good feeling to do really well in super-G on this hill and I'm looking forward to the giant slalom and slalom,” Shiffrin said. As with all previous starts at the World Cup, she will skip the downhill and start preparing for the technical disciplines, where she will be the biggest favorite.
The Swiss Lara Gutová-Behramiová did not follow up on the 2021 World Cup title and last year's Olympic gold. She lost in the second half of the race and eventually finished sixth, four hundredths of a second off the podium. Ranhild Mowinckelová from Norway, the leading woman in this discipline in the current SP season, was only a hundredth faster.
Olympic winner from Pyeongchang and fourth woman at the last World Cup, Ester Ledecká, had to give up participation in this year's peak of the season after clavicle surgery, so the Czechs were missing from the starting list.
World Downhill Skiing Championship in Méribel (France):
Women – super giant slalom: 1. Bassinová (It.) 1 :28.06, 2. Shiffrin (USA) -0.11, 3. Hütter (Austria) and Lie both -0.33, 5. Mowinckel (both Nor.) -0.36, 6. Gutová-Behrami ( Switzerland.) -0.37.
