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YANQING, China — Corinne Suter extended a dominant performance by Switzerland’s Alpine ski racing team at the Beijing Winter Olympics, delivering a victory Tuesday in the women’s downhill that was the fourth gold medal at the National Alpine Ski Centre for the Swiss team.
Suter, 27 and the gold medal winner in downhill at last year’s world championships, took the first Olympic medal of her career by covering the 1⅔-mile course in 1 minute 31.87 seconds, swiping the victory from Italian star Sofia Goggia, the downhill champion from the 2018 PyeongChang Games. Goggia, who was racing for the first time since suffering a knee injury more than three weeks ago, was 0.16 seconds behind Suter — good for silver. Italian teammate Nadia Delago took bronze.
Suter’s victory further established a Swiss romp here. Beat Feuz won the marquee men’s downhill, Marco Odermatt took gold in the men’s giant slalom, and Lara Gut-Behrami won the women’s super-G. The Swiss team also has three bronze medals in Alpine, bringing its medal count to seven. Austria is second in Alpine medals with five.
American star Mikaela Shiffrin finished 18th, well out of contention in the first Olympic downhill of her career. Skiing 12th — one spot ahead of Goggia and three ahead of Suter — she trailed at each split, and her finishing time was 2.49 seconds off Suter.
Unlike in giant slalom and slalom last week, Shiffrin, 26, entered the downhill with few expectations. She had entered just two World Cup downhills this season — both in Lake Louise, Canada, in early December — and she hadn’t placed in the top 25. That’s not to say that she doesn’t have potential in Alpine skiing’s fastest discipline; indeed, she won a World Cup downhill in January 2020 in Bulgaria.
But as a technical skier by trade, she is more likely to find success on a speed-racing course that has more turns than normal. Her two training runs here — in which she placed ninth and 17th — didn’t so much set her up for success in Tuesday’s race as they did give her a base of knowledge for Thursday’s Alpine combined. That event — which adds times from one run of downhill and one of slalom — plays to Shiffrin’s favor because, even with her struggles during these Games, she is perhaps the sport’s most versatile athlete. She won silver in the combined four years ago in PyeongChang, and her chief rival — Slovakia’s Petra Vlhova, who won gold in slalom here — departed China early with an injury.
Olympic rookie Keely Cashman finished as the top American in 17th, 0.23 seconds faster than Shiffrin.
Goggia, 29, would have been the prohibitive favorite here if not for her injury. She entered five World Cup downhills this season. The results: four wins and one crash. She is an aggressive, hold-nothing-back competitor in downhill, a threat in any speed race she enters. Since winning gold in the downhill at the PyeongChang Games, she had won 13 World Cup races. With the next Winter Olympics in her home country, another victory Tuesday would have pulled her alongside Alberto Tomba, the five-time Olympic medalist, as the most celebrated Italian Alpine racer in history.
But on Jan. 23 in Cortina d’Ampezzo — the very resort where the Olympic Alpine competition will be held in 2026 — Goggia suffered a scary crash, suffering a partially torn ACL. She had not competed since, skipping last week’s super-G in hopes of further recovering.
By Tuesday, though, she had a pair of downhill training runs under her. When she crossed the finish line in 1:32.03 — seizing the lead from her teammate Delago — she bent at the waist and let loose a guttural scream. Just outside the finish area, she gleefully hugged Delago and Delago’s sister Nicol.
Two skiers later, though, Suter delivered her gold medal-winning run — and the Swiss domination continued.
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