Alpine skiing-Sweden Hector wins exciting giant slalom
YANQING, China, February 7 (Reuters) – Sweden’s Sara Hector produced a fantastic display of controlled aggression to win the gold medal in a dramatic giant slalom for women at the Winter Olympics in Beijing on Monday.
Italy’s Federica Brignone took the silver medal and Swiss Lara Gut-Behrami the bronze after defending champion Mikaela Schiffrin was among 19 drivers who failed to finish their first runs.
Hector, this season’s world cup leader in the discipline, was fastest on the track called “The Ice River” in his first run and wrote a total time of 1 minute, 55.69 seconds, to finish 0.28 seconds ahead of the experienced Brignone.
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The Swede kept her nerves even though the race was stopped for about 15 minutes before she started her second run, after American Nina O’Brien crashed near the finish line.
“Can. I’m so proud, I can not put it into words,” said Hector. “I really tried to push it and give everything I got. It’s just amazing.
“I do not know how to describe (my feelings). It has been so much all day. I have been so nervous. It is so much emotion, it is crazy. It is certainly a lot of joy.”
O’Brien was treated by doctors in the target area before being carried off on a stretcher, with a spokesman for the US team confirming that she was “alert and responsive”.
Brignone, who appeared at his fourth Olympics and won a bronze medal in the giant slalom in Pyeongchang, said that winning silver was a dream come true.
“(It means) a lot,” she said. “Four years ago I was third, and before I came here I said that if I came back with a medal it would be a big dream for me. To do it in the first race, it’s fantastic.
“I waited and waited and I said ‘oh my god, this is so long’. But somehow I was calm. I knew I just had to ski, I thought about my skiing, and when I got to the gate I said, “it’s just skiing.”
O’Brien was not the only skier to lose control on a day that offered plenty of spillage.
The American Schiffrin failed to negotiate the first run and 11 skiers, including O’Brien and the French jumper Tessa Worley, crashed or missed gates in the second, even though O’Brien was the only one seriously injured, with a Reuters witness reporting that she went down hugging her legs in the target area.
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Reporting by Simon Jennings, further reporting by Shadia Nasralla and Tony Munroe; Edited by Ed Osmond
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