Marco Odermatt dominates in Beaver Creek, Dominik Paris finishes 6th
The Olympic season could not have started better for Marco Odermatt, who scored his third victory in three different disciplines. At the moment the Swiss star’s only misstep came in the Copper Mountain giant slalom, when he was eliminated in the first run after falling mid-race. In the first downhill of the season, on Beaver Creek’s Birds of Prey, the Swiss immediately redeemed himself by skiing the technical section better than anyone, finishing with a time of 1’29″84, and 30 hundredths ahead of American Ryan Cochran-Siegle. In third place installed Norway’s Adrian Sejersted, but detached already by 69 hundredths.
Dominik Paris is the best of the Azzurri with sixth place at 92 hundredths, all left at the mouth of the wall, while the other partials were level with the best on the leaderboard. Paris on the Birds of Prey boasts only one podium result: third place in the 2018 super-G. “A sixth place as a first race can be good – said Paris -, especially on a slope where I never felt comfortable. The gap is a bit high, but I made a mistake at the beginning of the wall, otherwise I could have been much closer to the leaders. It was a first confrontation, where you could see the forces on the field. I am not far away and we are coming to Europe soon, with different tracks and different snows. We will see”.
On a slope with a finish line raised 400 meters (100 vertical drop), the technical part took on even more meaning. 14th place for Florian Schieder, 1″47 from Odermatt. “Until the middle it went well,” Schieder said, “then I made a mistake, went low and couldn’t take away all the speed. Too bad because in practice I had managed to do well the whole way. A decent start to the season, however, on which we can work.” Mattia Casse accused 1″89 of disadvantages but finished in 23rd place, while Giovanni Franzoni, with bib 48, made a good run, finishing 2″28 behind and in 29th place overall. Guglielmo Bosca returns to the track where he was injured last year with a careful run at 2″44 from the leader, just outside the points. Nicolò Molteni finishes at 2″68, Benjamin Alliod closes at 2″75, Christof Innerhofer at 2″79.
