With beautiful sunshine and temperatures of -2° C, it was a perfect day today in Madonna di Campiglio, Italy, for the first event of the week-long 2001 FIS Snowboard World Championships. And it could not have been better for Canadian Jasey Jay Anderson, who took the gold here today, just few days after winning his third consecutive snowboard cross event.
"This is just amazing," Anderson said. "I got third in the GS World Cup standings which is fine but I was missing the top results although I knew I could win. It was one of my goals to take it here and I'm just so happy that it worked out."
Being the one to open the race with bib #1, Anderson looked strong from top to bottom and only Italy's Walter Feichter, leader of the Giant Slalom World Cup standings, could beat him in the first run.
Different than in regular season World Cup events, in World Championship races all first run finishers get a second run with the top 15 starting in reversed order. Defending GS World Champion Markus Ebner from Germany, who was 11th after the first run, took the early lead, but then had to leave the hot seat to Slovenia's Dejan Kosir, fourth after the first run.
When Anderson launched out of the start gate as the best of the 15 fastest racers from the first run, Kosir was still in the lead. The Canadian put everything he had into the second run and was more than one-and-a-half seconds ahead at the first intermediate time point. After a mistake further down, he was still leading by 98 hundredths of a second at the second split and claimed the lead when he crossed the finish line, leaving it all up to Feichter.
The Italian looked strong but could not pull it together and finally had to leave the gold to Jasey Jay.
Kosir, who usually does better in slalom finally got 2nd. "I am so happy," he said. "I was feeling pretty good in the first run and just went for it in the second by attacking. There were some risky moments when I could have still lost it but with some bad experience in similar situations in the World Cup I took the right measure and did not screw it up this time..."
Feichter dropped back to 3rd and was pleased with his result. "I made a mistake and lost speed," he said, "and there was no means to make it up again, but I am glad to make it to the World Championship podium. It happened to me before that I was strong in the first run but then just felt too much pressure and lost it to someone else."
Ebner did not manage to defend his GS title but did not feel too bad about 4th place. "It has been a kind of consolation," he said, "since I was not doing so well in GS this season and this is my best result so far. Fourth is always hard to stand but considering my results till now I really can't complain. I am more focusing on the parallel races anyway and those are still to come, so fourth is fine for me."
The women's Giant Slalom will be held tomorrow.
— Britta Semmler, MountainZone.com Correspondent
