A month ago Corinne Suter had not won a women’s World Cup downhill or super-G race in her career, now the Swiss skier is leading the season standings in both disciplines.
Suter got her first win in a super-G on Sunday, four weeks after winning her first downhill.
Suter coped with tricky conditions on the Kandahar course to beat Austria’s Nicole Schmidhofer by 0.43 seconds and her Swiss teammate Wendy Holdener by seven tenths.
“It was absolutely no perfect run,” said Suter, an early starter with bib No. 5. “I didn’t have a good feeling at the finish, my expectations were not very high.”
Suter became the fifth different winner in five super-G races this season.
The Swiss skier finished third in a race in Lake Louise, Alberta, in December and Sunday’s victory sent her top of the discipline standings, 39 points clear of Italy’s Federica Brignone.
After getting her first win in Altenmarkt-Zauchensee in January, Suter is also leading the downhill rankings, with Mikaela Shiffrin 61 points behind in second.
Even though she was missing a win until recently, Suter has made a name for herself as a consistent contender in speed races.
She racked up six podium places since February 2019, and won silver in downhill and bronze in super-G at last season’s world championships.
On Sunday, Brignone finished in fifth and closed the gap to overall leader Shiffrin to 145 points.
The American, who won the super-G world championship and World Cup title last season, is taking a break from ski racing since the death of her father, Jeff Shiffrin, last week.
Many racers struggled to keep their balance on the course, which caused difficulties because of its icy surface with patches of grippy snow.
“The conditions are very variable, you have to be flexible,” Suter said.
The two winners of the first two super-G races this season, Viktoria Rebensburg and Sofia Goggia, both landed in the safety netting after similar crashes and sustained season-ending injuries.
The German ski federation said Rebensburg, who won a downhill here on Saturday, had hurt her left knee and would need six to eight weeks for recovery, while Goggia underwent surgery for a fractured left arm and was ruled out for six weeks, according to the Italian federation.
The season ends with the World Cup Finals in Cortina d’Ampezzo on March 16-22 but neither Rebensburg nor Goggia was in a favorable position for any of the discipline titles.
The women’s World Cup travels to Kranjska Gora in Slovenia for a GS and a slalom next weekend. The races have been moved from Maribor because of a lack of snow and mild temperatures.
