Switzerland’s Marco Odermatt consolidated his place atop the overall World Cup standings with a second downhill victory in three days in Wengen on Saturday.
But a day after a season-ending injury to Alexis Pinturault in a heavy fall in the super-G, the dangers of ski racing again surfaced as Norway’s Aleksander Aamodt Kilde was helicoptered off after crashing awkwardly with the finish line in sight.
Kilde, last season’s downhill champion and 2020 overall World Cup winner, failed to control a jump into the final stretch of the demanding course in sunny conditions while travelling at an eye-watering 145km/h.
The 31-year-old went head over heels and flew back-first into the course netting. First aiders were quickly on the scene and tied an orange tourniquet round his right thigh before his evacutaion to hospital by helicopter.
“Three days of racing here, to finish by the longest (downhill), it’s too much, much too much,” said France’s second-placed finisher Cyprien Sarrazin after watching Kilde’s crash in a criticism of the packed calendar.
“When you see Kilde, who is one the strongest of all of us, bomb out like that, it’s not normal.”
Odermatt, who won downhill and giant slalom golds in last year’s World Ski Championships in Courchevel, started with bib number eight and clocked a winning 2min 25.64sec in his descent of the 4.2km-long Lauberhorn piste.
It was the Swiss racer’s second career downhill victory, having notched up his maiden win on the same Wengen piste on Thursday.
That win had made him the first male skier to win a giant slalom, a super-G and a downhill World Cup event in a single season since his compatriot Didier Cuche in 2009/10.
Saturday’s victory was the 31st in Odermatt’s career, 18 having come in the giant slalom, 11 in the super-G and now two in the downhill.
Domination
It leaves him on top of the overall standings on 1,016 points, a massive 552pts ahead of Austrian Marco Schwarz, since ruled out for the season with a knee injury. Sarrazin is in third place, 4pts further adrift, with Kilde in fourth, 576pts behind his Swiss rival.
Odermatt has won two consecutive overall World Cup titles as well as Olympic giant slalom gold in Beijing in 2022.
Sarrazin continued his rich vein of form to finish second, at 0.59sec.
It was a boost for a France team hit by Friday’s injury to Pinturault.
Sarrazin, after finishing second in the opening downhill, gave France their first men’s super-G victory in a decade, but Pinturault ruptured knee ligaments in a spectacular fall during that race, an injury that has ruled the 2021 overall World Cup winner out for the rest of the season.
Italian veteran Dominik Paris finished third on Saturday, as only 10 racers came within three seconds of Odermatt’s dominant winning time.
