Lindsey Vonn won the women’s Super-G title yesterday to be crowned overall World Cup champion for the third consecutive year.
The 100 points gives Vonn, the Olympic and world downhill champion, her third title as overall World Cup winner for this year. It was her 11th World Cup win of the season and the 33rd of her career to set a new US record.
“This was the dream season for me,” Vonn said. “To break the US record in World Cup wins and to get the Olympic gold in the downhill, my favorite discipline and the overall title for the third time — for me it doesn’t get much better. When you work this hard and be rewarded like this at the end of the season it feels so great.”
Despite bruising her knee after a crash in Thursday’s giant slalom, the US starlet set the fastest time down the Kadahar course, which plays host to next year’s world championships, with a time of 1 minute, 19.3 seconds.
Austria’s Elisabeth Goergl was second 0.16 seconds behind, with Swiss Nadia Styger third by 0.57 seconds, while Vonn’s main rival, Maria Riesch of Germany, was fourth to finally settle the contest for the overall title.
With just the slalom event left to come today, worth 100 points, Vonn now has 1,671 points compared with Reisch’s 1,456 in second, with Sweden’s Anja Paerson third on 1,047 and Vonn’s 215 point lead can not be caught.
As the last skier to race, Vonn led from the front and despite briefly falling behind Goergl’s earlier pace, she brought down her season in style after her downhill gold and Super-G bronze medals at last month’s Vancouver Winter Games.
■MEN’S GIANT SLALOM
AP, GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, GERMANY
Carlo Janka of Switzerland won the overall World Cup title and Ted Ligety of the US secured the giant slalom crystal globe.
Janka, the Olympic champion, won yesterday’s giant slalom to take an unassailable lead in the overall standings with one race remaining. He is now 106 points ahead of Benjamin Raich of Austria, who will finish in second place for the fourth straight year.
Janka became the first Swiss man to win the overall title since Paul Accola in 1992.
With his main rivals out of contention, Ligety completed the second run to share third place and clinch the title he also won in 2008.
Ligety led the standings and his closest rivals, Massimiliano Blardone of Italy and Marcel Hirscher of Austria, flopped in the first run. Blardone went off course and finished well behind, while Hirscher was disqualified for starting too early.
“I made some mistakes, but so did many other guys,” Ligety said. “This is a new hill, totally new course.”
Janka led after the first run and took no risks in the second heat to win in a combined time of 2 minutes, 20.87 seconds for his sixth victory of the season.
Raich finished eighth and with 100 points at stake in today’s slalom, the final race of the season, cannot overtake Janka.
Ligety was on course for the giant slalom title with his third-place finish in the first heat and raced a risk-free, uneventful second leg to secure the title.
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