Alex Vinatzer kind of expected it.

Alex Vinatzer’s words.

Alex Vinatzer spoke after winning the bronze medal in the men’s slalom at the Couchevel World Championships.

“It was a tough winter,” said the South Tyrolean Carabiniere, “in which I struggled to find confidence. I made it even if I lost something in the second run but did not want to overdo it with the risk of going out, I am very happy. The second run was really tough, we trained with the Germans on a similar course in Sestriere, I focused on my skiing and had good feelings. It was important to go into the race calm and keep my desire to attack at bay, in the second run I only thought about skiing round in the first gates until the entrance to the flat. Then I shifted gears until the bump and on the final piece, where I wanted to quit, I kicked too hard and found myself slightly off the ideal line. Before I left I told my skiman (Michael Moelgg, ed.) that we would meet at the finish line to celebrate, I was right. You have to have self-confidence, it took a little more time to find the right square on some missing details, from the palmarès point of view something will change, but from the personal point of view I just have to keep working in this direction. I want to share the medal with my family, my fiancée and all the staff, I was afraid for a few minutes to do another fourth place, in the end it went well. In these two years we have tried to improve, in the end you may take a few steps back, but the important thing is to always believe. We approached the season differently, I think I never attacked in any run at 100 percent, yet things had not gone as I had hoped. The giant slalom training helped me a lot, I’ve been participating in a lot of FIS races since the Ushuaia trip, and now I’ve been able to lower my score a lot, it helped me to relax my mind a little bit when I was going bad in slalom.”