CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, (Italy):- Austrian Vincent Kriechmayr won world downhill gold on Sunday, becoming the first skier in 16 years, and just the third racer, to claim a speed double at the same championships.
Kriechmayr, who won Thursday’s super-G in Cortina d’Ampezzo, kicked off the downhill in bib number one, timing 1min 37.79sec down the testing 2.6km-long Vertigine course.
Andreas Sander claimed a third championship silver for Germany, at just one-hundredth of a second off Kriechmayr. Swiss favourite Beat Feuz, the 2017 world champion in the discipline who went on to claim downhill bronze and super-G silver a year later at the Pyeongchang Olympics, claimed bronze at +0.18.
The 34-year-old had come into Cortina in top form having won two downhills on Kitzbuehel’s dreaded Streif course last month, and also bagged podium finishes in Val Gardena and Garmisch-Partenkirchen. But he had no answer for his Austrian rival who follows in the speed double footsteps of American Bode Miller, in 2005, and Austrian legend Hermann Maier, in 1999.
Kriechmayr, 29, once again proved capable of mastering a course which featured a technical midsection involving looping turns into traverses that demanded the maximum of man and ski in a battle against exhausting centrifugal forces.
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