Holding nothing back down the treacherous Super-G run at St. Moritz, USA’s Lindsey Vonn dominated once more the rest of the field a day after finishing a far and disappointed 23rd in her downhill run marred by a huge mistake on the lower section of the course. The 30-year-old racer from Vail, Colorado, beat once more the reigning Olympic champion Anna Fenninger, from Austria, and took advantage of harsh problems faced by other top-favorites to take the lead in the specialty standings.
Lindsey, who enjoyed her fifth season World Cup win with that new triumph – and her thirty-fourth in total since December 2004 – also moved up to 3rd place in the overall classification behind Slovenia’s Tina Maze and Fenninger, the last two winners of the big globe in 2013 and 2014.
The American who ended three times on the podium in the four Super-G races held so far this winter – only skiing out in Val d’Isère, France, after clocking the fastest intermediate times – feels now fully ready for the upcoming FIS World Championships at Vail/Beaver Creek that are starting early next week.
“I’m really pleased with my season so far, things went better and faster than I thought when I came back two months ago,” the former Olympic champion told the press after the race. “My confidence increased race after race after my first victory at Lake Louise that I didn’t expected to happen so early,” also said the four-time-overall World Cup champion.
“I think I’m able to push my limits the way I want now. Of course sometimes I run into problems as yesterday in the downhill race, yet I fought even harder today as the run was pretty challenging, especially in the lower part,” Lindsey Vonn added. “It’s the only way to win races nowadays against all those great athletes who also take great risks skiing down the slope as fast as possible. And it’s also the only way I like to race – at full speed, taking great risks. It’s so exciting, I enjoy so much to move at my limits, that’s why I have been training so hard for in past years.”
Very popular in the famous and prestigious Swiss resort where she already celebrated many great wins, Lindsey Vonn is more than proud and happy to be able to fight for more medals in her home town in the coming weeks on the challenging ‘Raptor’ run at Beaver Creek.
“The slope is so beautiful and challenging, just perfect for me, I can’t wait to return there,” she explained. “I greatly enjoyed some training runs our team had there earlier this month, the conditions were wonderful. The competitions will be so intense and interesting to watch.”
“In 1999, at the previous ski World Championships at Vail, I was a course worker who sometimes had to wake up in the middle of the night to get on the course and help preparing the slope,” she recalls, “I of course, was dreaming about racing there once at a major event, and now it’s happening. I’m so glad, you can’t imagine,” she also explained. “It’s particularly exciting for any athlete to compete in front of his or her home crowd, the friends and members of the family, and I’m so proud to have reached such a competitive level again. I’ll be staying in the team hotel as my house will be full of friends and members of my family. We all will have a great time at Beaver Creek I hope.”
“It’s one of those fascinating challenges which have so strongly fueled my motivation and my helped me so much in past years keeping on training intensively to get back at the top of my form. The past two years were so difficult but my hard work has paid off, I have been fully rewarded for all those efforts done during the past months. Last weekend was so amazing for me, I was so proud to equal and then break that victories record of Annemarie Moser-Proell. It was very important to me, and now I can fully focus again on my skiing.”
A multiple medal winner since the ski World Championships at Are, Sweden, in 2007, including two in gold in the speed events in 2009 at Val d’Isère before capturing Olympic gold at Vancouver in 2010, Lindsey has mostly performed well under pressure at recent major events. She learned a lot finishing twice 4th in downhill and Super-combined in 2005 at Santa Caterina. At the following World Championships, she finished three times on the podium in downhill at Are in 2007, Val d’Isère 2009 and Garmisch-Partenkirchen 2011.
“I was so sad and frustrated at Santa Caterina in 2005, yet I learned a lot at those competitions, my first FIS World Championships,” Lindsey explained at the press conference at St. Moritz. “Sometimes I attacked the course too hard as at the 2006 Olympics at Sestriere where I badly crashed in training. I have much more experience now. It helps me a lot to master difficult runs as here today. It’s the good side of getting older,” also said the American star who suffered her toughest accident at the 2013 Ski Worlds at Schladming, in Austria. She crashed hard there in the middle of her Super-G run while moving once more at her maximum to reach the podium.
Yet Lindsey, who intends to compete racing until the 2018 Olympics in Korea, is also looking forward for the coming seasons – and her possibilities to clinch a fifth overall World Cup title. “I don’t have any chance this winter as I don’t plan to race in the technical events, yet I feel really strong in giant slalom again. I can imagine be fighting again for the big globe in coming seasons. It would be great and it would mean a lot to me. This season I hope to have a chance to get the downhill globe at the end of the season,” also commented the speed specialist who has amassed nearly twenty globes in total in the past seven years.
