Olympic combined champion Ted Ligety reports regularly from the World Cup tour in collaboration with Denver Post ski writer John Meyer.
SESTRIERE, Italy — My chances of winning another World Cup giant slalom title probably slipped through my fingers when I went out in the first run Saturday.
I’m more than 100 points behind Austria’s Benjamin Raich, and we have only two more GS races in the season — this week in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, and then at the World Cup finals two weeks later in Are, Sweden. It’s still mathematically possible for me to defend the title I won last year, but being realistic, it’s not very likely.
I went into Saturday’s race in second place, but now I’m third, 105 points behind Raich and 93 behind Didier Cuche. I still have a reasonable chance of finishing the season second, which would be respectable but definitely not what I wanted this season.
It was a super-long GS, and the first 30 seconds were pretty flat. The gates were set 34 meters apart, compared with 22 meters last week at the world championships. It was more like a super-G than a GS.
I made a big mistake on the flat, tried to make up some time, made another mistake and fell on my hip.
This week, at least, we’re going to a hill that has been good for me in slalom and GS. Winning there last year gave me the inside track to the GS title. Hopefully I can repeat as winner there and improve my chances of finishing second in the standings. Then, if something freakish happens to Raich, I would have a chance of winning the title again after all.
Things didn’t go much better in Sunday’s super-combined, a super-G/slalom combo. In the super-G, I made a big mistake on the flats at the top, was doing OK in the middle and then made another big mistake toward the bottom. I was in 37th place going into the slalom run and wound up 25th overall.
I’m really psyched about Lindsey Van winning the first world championships title in women’s ski jumping. When I was growing up in Park City, Utah, she lived a couple of doors down from me. It’s really cool for her to go down in history that way.
