Beautiful sunshine, nice slopes and excellent snow conditions are what the snowboarders will recall from this World Cup stop in Park City, Utah (USA), the venue for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic snowboard competitions. Exciting head-to-head racing took place today when the parallel giant slalom riders hit the Olympic slope "C.B.‘s Run" at the Park City Mountain Resort, 45 minutes from Salt Lake City.
Most of the riders liked the course a lot although it was quite technical and required a lot of physical strength. Austrian Alexander Maier, ranked fifth after the qualifications, made his way through the finals by beating French rider Guillaume Sachot, American Christoper J. Klug and Austria’s Werner Ebenbauer. In the final heat he faced Gilles Jaquet from Switzerland and despite a great start out of the gate, he crashed at the fifth gate and fell.
Maier was lucky the same thing happened to Jaquet on the fourth gate giving him an advantage of 1.72 seconds in penalty time. Winning his second run, Maier claimed his first-ever World Cup win.
"I had everything in between ten and two so this is the only result I was missing out of the top ten,“ he said. "This feels great. The top guys in Austria are close so it will be tough to make the Olympic team but I'd definitely like to come back for the Games next year. I am just scared that my shoulder is going to be worse from this crash. The same happened to me with my left shoulder and I needed an operation. I would not like this to happen with the other shoulder now."
Jaquet was happy with 2nd. "This course is really nice," he said, “but it is also pretty long and very technical in the first steep. My legs got so tired and I was missing the power in the last two runs so I am fine with second place."
The small final for third place turned out to be an Austrian duel between Stefan Kaltschuetz and Werner Ebenbauer with Kaltschuetz finally claiming 3rd place.
French rider Mathieu Bozzetto did not get any further than the semi-finals today and ended up 9th, enough to increase his lead in the overall parallel standings, ahead of teammate Nicolas Huet and Sweden's Richard Richardsson.
Steffi von Siebenthal from Switzerland won the women’s race when she beat French rider Karine Ruby in the final duel. "The course setting required a lot of technical skills," she said, "but I was feeling good and liked my riding today. I made some mistakes also but tried to pull it together and it worked."
Ruby had come in straight from Hawaii and looked like she had really recovered quite a bit from all the racing over the past weeks. And she proved it with a 2nd-place finish. "I have been waiting for a good result again for quite a while," she said, "and I’m really happy. I was about to lose all my confidence."
Milena Meisser from Switzerland took 3rd ahead of Carmen Ranigler.
By finishing 2nd, Ruby took the yellow leader bib back from Ranigler who had just taken it last week. The Italian even dropped back to 3rd place overall behind US rider Rosey Fletcher.
The pre-Olympic test was concluded successfully although there are a couple of course flaws that will need to be fixed before the riders get back to Park City next year, particularly the halfpipe which had a bit of a wide flat.
"There was a miscalculation of where the flat bottom was and, when the snow was pushed, how much snow was needed," FIS race director Ted Martin said, “but now we learned that which is good and I’m sure we will have a great pipe next year."
The next and last stop will be the finals in Ruka, Finland, March 14-17 with parallel giant slalom, parallel slalom, halfpipe and snowboard cross.
— Britta Semmler, MountainZone.com Correspondent
