A race like the whole season: Kira Weidle did not finish ninth at the World Cup final in Soldeu. The Slovenian Ilka Stuhec won ahead of the winner of the Downhill World Cup, Sofia Goggia.
The two-time downhill world champion Ilka Stuhec beamed all over her face. In Soldeu/Andorra she won the seventh World Cup downhill of her career. The 32-year-old was also faster than this winter’s downhill dominator, Italy’s Sofia Goggia (+0.51 seconds), who finished second. Lara Gut-Behrami from Switzerland was third (+ 0.81).
A podium place would have been possible for the only German starter Kira Weidle. But in the end she was annoyed about ninth place.
A mistake costs Weidle a top position
Weidle (Starnberg) was very good at the split times for a long time. In the lower part, however, the 27-year-old made a big mistake when she was hit in a left-hand corner and overturned. Suddenly several tenths of a second were gone – and so only ninth place remained for the German (+ 1.20 seconds).
That means seventh place in the downhill World Cup. This winter she did not quite match her performance from the 2018/2019 and 2020/2021 seasons, when she finished fifth in the discipline rankings.
“I was doing well. In the last target curve, where it goes flat, the outside ski left. That really pulls the pace.”the native of Stuttgart was annoyed about her momentous mistake in the ARD sports show: “It was a race like the whole season: There were good parts, but then something happened again that prevented a good placement.”
The Italian Sofia Goggia had already secured the small crystal ball in the discipline ranking before the race. However, the 30-year-old couldn’t match Stuhec’s time and had to settle for second place at the end of the season.
In the downhill World Cup, the order is exactly the opposite – here Stuhec is behind Goggia but ahead of the Swiss Corinne Suter, who benefited from the fall of the Italian Elena Curtoni. Nina Ortlieb (Austria) also fell. Both athletes remained unharmed.