After super-G and alpine combined on Friday, the biggest spectacle of the Hahnenkamm race weekend takes place on Saturday, the downhill on the fearsome Streif slope. The weekend finishes on Sunday with a totally different but still challenging race, the slalom on the Ganslern slope.
Those two, especially the downhill, are the most prestigious single races of the Men’s Alpine Skiing World Cup tour. They are also the highest-paying races in alpine skiing, with the winners of both earning 70,300 euros (76,700 U.S. dollars).
Svindal Aims For First Hahnenkamm Downhill Victory
The downhill on the Streif is the most famous event of the Hahnenkamm race weekend and is often considered as the most challenging ski race in the world. The race is scheduled to start on Saturday at 11:45 am local time (5:45 am Eastern time).
The downhill World Cup leader Aksel Lund Svindal achieved last weekend his first win in one of the big classics, the Lauberhorn downhill. Now he comes to Kitzbühel aiming for his first win of the other big classic, the Hahnenkamm downhill, where his only podium finish so far is the second place of 2014. Yet the training times don’t promise an easy task for him; he was third in the first training on Tuesday and sixth in the second training on Thursday.
Austria’s Hannes Reichelt, the man who beat Svindal for the 2014 win, is one of Svindal’s biggest rivals also this time. Although he is already 208 points behind Svindal in tied second place in the downhill World Cup, the second places of the last two downhills in Santa Caterina and Wengen show he has found his form. In the first training he narrowly beat Svindal for the second place. The second training didn’t go as well and Reichelt was only 12th.
Still, the biggest favorite might be the Frenchman Adrien Théaux. After a dominant win in Santa Caterina, he had said his big goal for the season is Kitzbühel. Although his only previous podium finish on the Streif is a third place in 2011, he has shown good form on the training runs this week. Théaux set the quickest time on Tuesday by 0.21 seconds to Reichelt, and the fourth-quickest on Thursday, 1.07 seconds from lead.
The quickest of the second training and the biggest surprise of the training runs was Mattia Casse. 36th in the downhill World Cup, the best downhill result of the 25-year-old Italian so far is a 15th place in Garmisch-Partenkirchen last year. This year he has achieved a career-best fifth place in the super-G of Beaver Creek. Not only he was the quickest of the second training on the Streif, but he did well also in the first training, finishing fifth, only 0.45 seconds behind Théaux. As Casse is only 42nd on the World Cup start list, he will start with a high bib number and there will remain tension even after the World Cup frontrunners have started.
Second-quickest in the second training was Casse’s countryman Christof Innerhofer 0.34 seconds behind. The Italian is seventh in the downhill standings, yet has shown decent form in the last two downhill races, finishing fourth in Santa Caterina (despite carrying a gate pole for half of the run) and fifth in Wengen. However, Kitzbühel has been an unsuccessful venue for him with his best downhill result being fifth in 2014.
The defending Hahnenkamm downhill winner is Norway’s Kjetil Jansrud. Although the course had to be shortened to just half of its entire length last year, one can say he truly deserved the win as he was also the quickest man of the training runs on the full course. Defending the downhill World Cup title, Jansrud has had an inconsistent season so far. Besides the second place in Beaver Creek and the third place Val Gardena, his other results have been ninth, 12th, and 27th, and he is only fourth in this season’s downhill standings. He is still to find his best form on the Streif; he was 21st in the first training and 11th in the second training.
Missing the victory by 0.02 seconds last year, the 2013 Hahnenkamm downhill winner Dominik Paris had a poor start to his season. The fourth place last weekend in the Wengen downhill was his best result of the season; however with his only proper training run on the Streif, he was only the 30th-quickest of the second training, so the expectations can’t be very high.
Also last year’s third, Guillermo Fayed, could have only one proper training run and finished it only in 28th place on Thursday. Sharing the second-place of the downhill World Cup, the Frenchman has had poor results after the second place of Val Gardena; he was ninth in Santa Caterina and only 22nd in Wengen, though being affected by bad visibility at the latter.
One potential podium contender is missing. Max Franz of Austria crashed on the bottom section in Tuesday’s training. Although he could ski down to the finish area after the crash, he had hurt his left ankle, knee, and wrist, with the ankle needing surgery. The recovery will take eight weeks, meaning Franz won’t race on the World Cup tour anymore this season.
Another crash happened in the second training with another Austrian hurting himself. Florian Scheiber crashed on the bottom section and hurt his right knee, and had to be taken to hospital by helicopter. He will have his knee operated still on Thursday.
Kristoffersen Big Favorite In Slalom
The Hahnenkamm race weekend finishes with the slalom on Sunday. Undulating terrain makes the Ganslern one of the most challenging slalom slopes in the World Cup. The first run starts on Sunday at 10:30 am local time (4:30 am Eastern time) and the second run starts at 1:30 pm local (7:30 am ET).
The slalom World Cup leader Henrik Kristoffersen of Norway is the biggest favorite for the race. He has four wins and one second place from this season’s slalom races. In his young career, he hasn’t won the Hahnenkamm slalom yet; however he was second in 2014.
Marcel Hirscher of Austria has been Kristoffersen’s main rival in slalom this season. Before Wengen he had one win and three second places, and was trailing Kristoffersen by 40 points. But he couldn’t perform at his usual level in Wengen; after finishing 10th on the first run, he didn’t finish the second run and Kristoffersen extended his lead to 140 points. Besides he lost the overall World Cup lead to Aksel Lund Svindal during the Wengen weekend. The 2013 Hahnenkamm winner and last year’s runner-up Hirscher needs badly a good result in Kitzbühel, otherwise his title defense in both slalom and overall may get difficult.
Last year’s Hahnenkamm slalom winner Mattias Hargin of Sweden has had a poor season so far; 10th place in the season’s first slalom in Val d’Isère is still his best result and he is only 24th in the slalom World Cup standings. Repeating his triumph on the Ganslern seems very unlikely.
With the third places of Santa Caterina and Adelboden, leading both races after first run, Alexander Khoroshilov of Russia looked like the biggest challenger for Kristoffersen and Hirscher. He lacked pace in Wengen before crashing out on the first run; however Wengen with its unusually flat slope wasn’t the best indicator of skiers’ form.
Khoroshilov’s bad race in Wengen allowed Felix Neureuther of Germany to climb into third place in the slalom World Cup. The three-time slalom World Cup runner-up has had a difficult season and his dreams of the slalom title are very much gone; he is 293 points behind the leader Kristoffersen. However, Neureuther has always performed well in the Hahnenkamm slalom, making the podium four times and achieving his first World Cup win there in 2010 as well as another win in 2014.
The 2010 slalom Olympic gold medalist Giuliano Razzoli of Italy comes to Kitzbühel in the fifth place of the World Cup standings and as the runner-up of last weekend’s slalom in Wengen. It is hard to see him beating Kristoffersen, yet he has a pretty good record on the Ganslern slope; twice on podium in third place as well as twice fourth, including last year.
Razzoli’s countryman Stefano Gross has shown improving form during the past two weeks. The fifth place in Adelboden was his first top-10 result of the season, and in Wengen he achieved his first podium result, finishing third.