Ski: Norway double win at Madonna – Switzerland clearly beaten

Norway double win at Madonna – Switzerland clearly beaten

Swiss slalom riders suffer a setback in the second World Cup slalom of the season. Loïc Meillard finished 11th as the best Swiss ski rider in the double win for Norwegians Henrik Kristoffersen and Sebastian Foss-Solevaag.

It was a drastic change of scenery. There was no end waiting for the season to open. For 317 days the world slalom championship at the World Cup stopped. And now, suddenly, everything had to go very fast on Monday in Alta Badia. There was barely time to pause and breathe deeply. In Madonna di Campiglio the next mandatory appointment was already called, just 32 hours after the start of the Great Laughter.

Daniel Yule could only love the rush. He escaped as quickly as possible from the place where things had not gone the way he wanted and, what was even more important to him, he was able to move to the place where everything had gone well for him in the last two races: victory two years ago . , Victoria last January.

They shouldn’t be good eleven months later. Yule and with him, his teammates clearly missed writing the next chapter in the wonderful Swiss success story on the Canalone Miramonti track, on the slope on which three years before the promising team, led by Matteo Joris del Valle de Aosta, set a big exclamation point for the first time. would have.

Thanks to Luca Aerni’s second place, slalom runners had finally become (again) socially acceptable in the Swiss ski nation. They had changed the label of the barely noticed, sometimes ridiculed appendix for the stamp of approval. A half-hearted discipline has become a showcase project from which last winter’s strongest slalom team emerged. Since then, Aernis’s podium has followed Joris’s protégés in all 27 slaloms with six wins, two more second places and seven third places. 57 percent podium place rate, compared to zero percent in the previous seven winters.

From 2 to 13, from 5 to 22

The opportunity to increase this percentage also occurred this time after the first run. Following his victory at Alta Badia, Ramon Zenhäusern, second-fastest behind Foss-Solevaag, headed back to the podium with added momentum and self-confidence, with fifth-place Yule also having corresponding hopes. .

But everything turned out different. Neither Zenhauser nor Yule found their way down the poorly marked incline in the second round. Zen houses fell to 13th place, Yule was even worse. It was found in 22nd place in the final ranking.

Meillard took the opposite route. Neuchâtel, who had already recovered ten places the day before in the second round, moved up six places to eleventh place and were unexpectedly the best of their team that night. Tanguy Nef, the fourth Swiss finalist, was ranked 18th.

Events also rushed forward at the front. Kristoffersen improved his decision in eleven places and thus avoided the first victory of Foss-Solevaag in the World Cup. Third came South Tyrolean Alex Vinatzer, who recently returned after an appendix operation. (zap / sda)