the swedish Sarah Hector She became the new giant Olympic champion, winning the first alpine skiing event of the Beijing 2022 Games on Monday, in Yanqing, where she succeeded the American in history Mikaela Shiffrin, who was unable to defend his title by going off course in the seventh gate of the first heat; and in which she was accompanied on the podium by the Italian Federica Brignone and the swiss Lara Gut-Behrami.
Hector, 29, had one silver and two bronze medals and in World Championships, always in the team event. And in the World Cup he has just four wins -all in giant-, three of them this season, eight after his first victory; so the Swede -who thanks to these successes commands the classification of the discipline in the regularity competition- celebrated the greatest success, by far, of her sports career.
This Monday he captured the second giant Olympic title for Sweden since Pernilla Wiberg achieved it in Albertville’92 (France), by covering both sleeves in a global time of one minute, 55 seconds and 69 hundredths, 28 less than Brignone31, winner of the great Crystal Ball two seasons ago, who maintained second place after the decisive descent and captured the silver medal, thus improving on the Olympic bronze four years ago, in PyeongChang (South Korea) .
gut30, winner of the World Cup overall six seasons ago and who has been experiencing a second sporting youth for two years with the Spanish coach Joseph Louis Alejo -she was second in the general classification last season, in which she won two golds, in giant and super giant; and a bronze, in descent at the World Championships in Cortina d’Ampezzo (Italy)-, she climbed five places, she was 72 hundredths of Hector and, for just eight, ‘took’ the Austrian from the podium Katharina Trumpe; that, after being third in the first race, she finished in the always ungrateful fourth place.
The test began with a real bombshell, because Shiffrin, who at 26 has already won everything in alpine skiing a few years ago -including two Olympic gold medals, six World Cups and three times the World Cup overall, a competition in which he has 73 victories, in which no one approaches among the assets- he left the tour at the first change. The super-champion from Vail (Colorado) made a clearly unusual mistake for her, when she skipped the seventh gate – at the end of the first heat she thought it had been the fifth, as she declared at the finish line – by skidding too much with the internal ski , so it was removed.
Shiffrin, the main figure of the winter king sport, who after becoming the youngest of all time to win Olympic gold in slalom, at the age of 18, at the Sochi’14 Games (Russia), won the title of giant in the from PyeongChang, is one of only seven female skiers in history with victories in all disciplines. Reason why in Beijing he still has, on her role, enough ammunition to expand her more than outstanding track record. To begin with, next Wednesday, she will compete in the slalom, a discipline in which her 47 victories constitute an absolute historical record in the same modality in the World Cup.
But this Monday the North American star failed, losing the opportunity to emulate the Italian Deborah Compagnonithe only one to revalidate the giant Olympic title, something she did in Nagano’98 (Japan), four years after having won it in Lillehammer (Norway).
And Hector did not miss the great opportunity of his sports career.
In the first round he had also lost all options Petra Vlhova, last winner of the World Cup and world champion of the discipline three years ago, in Are (Sweden). The Slovakian, who had advanced her trip to China to better acclimatize to the hard artificial snow of Yanqing, could only set the thirteenth time in the first heat, one second and 78 hundredths of a second. Hector; and she lost a position in the second, to finish fourteenth, almost two and a half seconds behind the new Olympic champion.
the french Tessa Worley, another of the candidates, was seventh (at 1.37) after the first act; and she went off track in the second, interrupted for several minutes by the spectacular fall of Nina O’Brien. The American, sixth in the first round, had an accident at the last gate and was evacuated on a stretcher from a track where the Norwegian Ragnhild Mowinckel After the outcome, he maintained the fifth provisional position that he occupied after the first descent (more than a second); and the slovenian Meta Hrovat -fourth after the first set, at 92 hundredths- ‘slipped’ to seventh, which she occupied just behind another Norwegian, Thea Louise Stjernesund.
In the second round, the woman from Girona went off track Núria Pauthe only Spanish participant. Paua debutant in the Games and who pays for a large part of her preparation herself, had been fortieth in the first, six seconds and 63 hundredths of the time with which she was leading Hector; that, despite stating that he had been sleeping badly for several days, he did not allow himself to be betrayed by his nerves at the decisive moment; and he achieved Olympic glory.