By Canadian Press

Kilde wins home ski race in Norway, locks up super-G title

Mar 6, 2022 | 6:46 AM

KVITFJELL, Norway — Canada’s Jack Crawford raced to silver in a World Cup super-G on Sunday, on the heels of his bronze-medal performance at the Beijing Olympics. 

The 24-year-old from Toronto, who was third in Alpine combined last month in Beijing, lost to Aleksander Aamodt Kilde by just 0.07 seconds on the Norwegian’s home course.

Kilde, the Olympic bronze medallist, mastered a downhill-like, fast course set on the Oympiabakken hill in sunny conditions. Olympic super-G champion Matthias Mayer of Austria was 0.12 behind in third.

“To win on home soil, together with the Norwegian crowd, beautiful weather, great conditions, it couldn’t be better,” Kilde said.

Crawford had a breakout performance at the Beijing Games, missing the podium in the men’s downhill by less than a tenth of a second. He was sixth in the super-G.

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Sunday was Kilde’s 13th career win, all in the speed events of downhill and super-G. But it was only his first World Cup win in 18 starts at the Alpine skiing venue of the 1994 Winter Games.

Kilde’s main rival for the super-G title, Marco Odermatt, trailed by 61 points going into the race. But the Swiss skier, whose strongest event is the giant slalom, struggled throughout on the course set by the coach of the Swiss speed team, Manfred Widauer.

Odermatt finished 1.68 behind in 28th and scored just three points. As a result, he dropped to third in the discipline standings, behind Mayer, and neither can now overtake Kilde at the season-ending race in Courchevel on March 17.

Odermatt has gained only 39 points across the three races in Norway this weekend but remains a strong favorite for the World Cup overall title. He still leads runner-up Kilde, the 2019-20 champion, by 189 points with five technical and two speed races remaining.

Kilde was last crowned as the season’s best super-G racer in 2016, making him the seventh male skier to win the prize at least twice.

Two Norwegians achieved the feat earlier: Aksel Lund Svindal, who won it a record five times, and Kjetil Jansrud, who retired after Saturday’s downhill and has three super-G globes.

Dominik Paris finished 0.21 behind in fourth, a day after the Italian won the downhill on the same hill, and Olympic downhill champion Beat Feuz trailed by 0.31 in fifth. The rest of the field was more than seven-tenths of a second off the pace.

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— With files from The Associated Press. 

The Associated Press