Winter Olympic skiing 2014 results: Austria takes 2 medals in super-G, including gold for Anna Fenninger

Austria add two more medals to its total in the women's super-G on Saturday, including a gold takes to a brilliant run by Anna Fenninger

Austria continued its reign of dominance in Olympic super-G on Saturday. A total of 24 medals have been handed out since the event was added to the Winter Olympics in 1988, and the Austrians have now won eight of those medals after securing gold and bronze in Sochi.

Anna Fenninger took the gold with a time of 1:25.52, nosing ahead of silver medalist Maria Hoefl-Riesch of Germany by 0.55 seconds. Fenninger's country-mate, Nicole Hosp, was just 0.66 seconds out of first and 0.11 seconds out of silver in taking bronze.

The United States' Julia Mancuso took eighth place in the event, 1.52 seconds behind Fenninger. Mancuso, who has a bronze medal in women's super combined slalom, told NBC Olympics that she was hesitant on the course after watching several skiers struggle before her start. Seven of the first eight bibs on the course did not finish, thanks in part to soft snow.

The gold was Fenninger's first medal at this year's Olympics. She finished fourth in the women's super combined downhill. Hoefl-Riesch and Hosp both added their second medals in Sochi. Hoefl-Riesch won the super combined slalom, beating Hosp who took silver in the event.

Austria has now seven total medals at the 2014 Winter Olympics. Germany has 12, putting them in a tie for the second-most behind the United States and Norway.

Copyright : sbnation.com

Christensen, Kenworthy and Goepper sweep Sochi slopestyle skiiing for USA

USA's Nicholas Goepper, Joss Christensen and Gus Kenworthy celebrate sweeping the podium in the men's freestyle skiingsSlopestyle finals at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park during the Sochi Winter Olympics on February 13, 2014. 

Americans Joss Christensen, Gus Kenworthy and Nick Goepper swept the podium in the Winter Olympic debut of men’s slopestyle skiing on Thursday.

The podium sweep was just the third for the US in Winter Olympic history, joining men’s figure skating in 1956 and men’s halfpipe snowboarding in 2002. 

All four US gold medals in Sochi have come at Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, and Thursday’s haul came 15 hours after Kaitlyn Farrington and Kelly Clark grabbed gold and bronze in women’s halfpipe snowboarding.

Britain’s James Woods produced a very creditable fifth place.

Another bumper crowd at Extreme Park were treated to a thrilling display of acrobatics. Christensen led the pack after qualifying and his 95.80 on his opening run of the final, which he capped with a stunning switch triple-corked 1440, assured him of the title even before his second attempt.

Christensen’s three off-axis jumps at the end of his first qualifying run totaled 10 full spins in the span of 15 seconds all coming while he skied over the ramp backward. His first run in the finals won the gold, and his second would have been good enough to win silver.

Reflecting the have-a-go spirit of the sport, though, the 22-year-old nailed another spectacular flurry of flips, spins and tricks for a score of 93.80, which would have been enough for gold in itself.

“I am so stoked about an American one-two-three,” said Kenworthy.

Teenager Goepper, who won the last two X-Games titles, added: “I think it’s going to give the U.S. a lot more confidence and it’s going to get a lot of people really excited.”

Goepper and Kenworthy raised Christensen on their shoulders following what amounted to a victory lap during Christensen’s last run down the mountain. The good friends wore flags as capes in the giddy aftermath of their victory in the sport’s Olympic debut.

Christensen was the last slopestyle skier named to the Olympic team, getting the nod over, among others, former world champion Tom Wallisch. The 22-year-old from Park City, Utah, was easily the best on a sun-splashed day where the weather was so warm that teammate Bobby Brown who finished ninth wore only a T-shirt in the finals.

“I can’t believe we made it,” Christensen said. “It’s been a long journey.”

A long and sometimes painful journey: Christensen lost his father J.D. in August and got the news while training in New Zealand. The last six months have been a mix of grieving and renewed focus for a skier whose lengthy list of injuries includes a pair of broken wrists and microfracture surgery in his knee.

“I hope I made my father proud,” he said. “Through all the injuries I’ve had, he’s always supported me and never said stop. I hope he’s looking down and smiling. Did it for him.”

Christensen’s first run in the finals produced a 95.80, giving the rest of the 12-man field a target to beat. None could top the kid with the floppy blonde hair and easy smile that seems to embody a sport full of tricks and fun.

Kenworthy, from Telluride, Colorado, was already planning to head back home with a family of stray dogs that call the streets of Sochi home. Now they’ll have some company a silver medal. He raised his arms over his head after his second finals run and busted out laughing when his score of 93.60 was revealed.

While Christensen learned his tricks on the best facilities in the world in his home town of Park City, Utah, Britain’s James Woods had to make do with a dry slope in the unglamorous city of Sheffield. 

Woods made it through to the final in third place but, hampered by a hip injury he sustained in a crash last week, was unable to produce the sort of triple-cork trick that might have delivered Britain their second Olympic medal on the snow. 

“I can do triples. I’ve got them,” said Woods, who finished fifth behind Norway’s Andreas Haatveit. “I got slammed in practice and, to be honest, on any other regular occasion, there is no way I would be anywhere near my boots and my skis at the moment. But I am incredibly proud to be here in such an immense final. It’s the Olympics and Joss is the nicest guy on the face of the earth, so I couldn’t be happier for anyone else.”

Copyright : theguardian.com

IOC: Bobsled track worker has broken legs

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia -- An Olympic track worker struck by a bobsled broke both his legs and may have a concussion, IOC officials said Thursday.

The worker was on the track when he was hit by a forerunning sled near the finish line at the Sanki Sliding Center, just before the start of Thursday's two-man bobsled training.

"We still do not know why he was in this zone and exactly what happened," IOC President Thomas Bach said in a visit to The Associated Press office in Sochi.

Bach added that the worker "maybe" has a concussion.

Later, IOC spokesman Mark Adams told the AP: "I understand he is conscious and talking and has two broken legs."

Sochi organizers said the unidentified man was taken by helicopter to a hospital, but gave no other information about his injuries. Officials said the crash took place just before the finish line, which would suggest that the sled likely had not yet started to brake.

Also, officials said the luge team relay event scheduled to make its Olympic debut on Thursday will take place as scheduled.

The first bobsled training session was delayed at the start for about 35 minutes as a work crew repaired a light fixture that was apparently smashed in the accident. Also, the track was cleared of other debris that had fallen into the finish area.

Olympic athletes remained in the start area during the delay, well away from the crash location.

Forerunning sleds are used before training and competition sessions to assess track conditions and make sure the facility is safe for racing. Also, people in the vicinity of the track are almost always alerted that a sled is in the track through public-address announcements, though it was unclear why the worker struck was unaware that the session was beginning.

It's also unclear why the worker was on the track when the sled came out the final curve and approached the finish line. The sled that struck him was the second "forerunner" used before the training session.

Loudspeakers in the finish-deck area were working during training after the crash, though there has been at least one incident when the public-address system at the facility — an absolutely critical part of the track's safety plan — failed.

It went silent when the U.S. and other international luge teams visited the Sochi track for a training session in November after electricity was lost. That impacted lights, timing devices and the speaker system that allows sliders up top know when sleds at the bottom of the chute have been removed and the track is clear for the next competitor.

In turn, it also tells people in the finish area that a sled is on the way.

"We didn't really know what was going on," USA Luge coach Mark Grimmette said in November, when detailing how training was interrupted.

The Sochi track was designed to be safer following the death of luger Nodar Kumarishtavili in an accident hours before the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver Games four years ago. There have been no major mishaps during any of the competition so far, and athletes have been complimentary of the track's condition.

"To be honest, the ice is phenomenal," U.S. skeleton racer Katie Uhlaender said following the first two heats of the women's competition, several hours before the mishap. "It's better than it was in training and whoever they got working on the ice, kudos, because they are doing Olympic level work on the track. It is fast and it's fun."

In 2005, U.S. skeleton racer Noelle Pikus-Pace was struck by a bobsled in the outrun of a track in Canada, shattering a leg and ultimately causing her to miss the 2006 Turin Olympics.

Copyright : miamiherald.com

5 Countries Win Gold Medals in Sunday Events at Sochi Olympics

Athletes from Slovakia, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland and the United States have won gold medals in Sunday events at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

Anastasiya Kuzmina of Slovakia defended her Olympic title from the Vancouver games four years ago by winning the women's biathlon 7.5-kilometer sprint.

Dutch speedskater Ireen Wust won the women's 3,000-meter race, edging out skaters from the Czech Republic and Russia.

Austrian Matthias Mayer took the top prize in the Alpine skiing downhill men's event.

Switzerland's Dario Cologna won the men's 30-kilometer cross country skiathlon.

And Jamie Anderson of the United States won the inaugural women's snowboarding slopestyle competition ahead of athletes from Finland and Britain.

Medals will also be awarded Sunday in three other events: men's ski jumping, team figure skating and men's luge singles

Norway leads the medal count with six, and is tied with the U.S. and the Netherlands for the most gold medals with two.

There are 98 medal events at the Sochi Games, 12 more than in Vancouver four years ago.

Copyright : voanews.com

Column: Bode's last ride begins with a whimper

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia -- In a couple of days, after a few more races, Bode Miller will make it official.

Or not.

The most decorated skier America has ever produced, and one of the most talented the sport has ever seen, will be done with the Olympics at age 36, after competing in five Winter Games and winning five medals — so far — but without the gold in the one discipline he wanted most.

Bode being Bode, getting him to admit either is a longshot.

After finishing eighth in the downhill, the first of five men's races here, Miller paused for a long time at the bottom of the course Sunday and stared back up the hill for a long time. Asked what he was thinking at that moment, he launched into one of those rambling answers that make it hard to know how much he believed and how much was said simply to get a rise out of his audience.

As someone with extensive experience interviewing Miller, who also happens to be one of the most entertaining and exasperating athletes I've ever run across, my translation follows his remarks in parentheses.

What Miller said: "I was just going through the run, seeing if there was anything that I would change or how I feel."

(Translation: "If I'd known I was going to finish eighth, I would have stayed in bed.")

Miller: "It's tough when you have to judge yourself, because the clock doesn't really seem to judge you fairly."

(Translation: "If there were style points in skiing, like figure skating or that goofy new slopestyle snowboard race, I'd have won every event I ever entered.")

Miller: "Just like I've said a million times, I'm not always so attached to the result. I would have loved to get a gold medal today or any medal, but I was making sure that I knew where I was at, before I had to go deal with everybody else telling me what they thought."

(Translation: "I wish you guys would just disappear.")

Frankly, what should have been a sweet story about the closing flourish by an aging skier to cap one of the great careers in Olympic Alpine history can't be told without asking "What if?"

Miller's talent has always been equal parts blessing and burden. In addition to the five Olympic medals, he won two overall World Cup titles and left rivals gaping at his margins of victory and how he recovered from mistakes that would have crashed almost anyone else.

Yet for someone who inspired so much awe in others, he should have won more.

At the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, Miller came in without expectations and exited with two silvers. By the time the Turin Games rolled around in 2006, he was considered a lock to medal in all five races, only to squander his best moves off the course and inside a disco. At the 2010 Vancouver Games, instead of partying like an Olympian, Miller finally skied like one, winning a medal in each color and pretending that he couldn't care less.

"Why perform now?" Miller said at the time. "Because most likely, it's what I wanted to do."

Miller also wanted to revolutionize the sport, and he did. He grafted the style, equipment and attitude he picked up from snowboarding and gradually convinced nearly everyone in the Alpine establishment to embrace and copy it. Yet the genius that enabled him to survive one close call after another was the same thing that lured him out onto the edge again and again.

Matthias Mayer, the 23-year-old Austrian who won the downhill gold Sunday with a very cautious, technical run, counts Miller among his idols. So does U.S. teammate Marco Sullivan, who a day earlier spoke about Miller's inimitable style in almost-mystical tones.

"The angles his body can stack up, his bone structure in a way, that it just looks like he is ... it's effortless," Sullivan said. "The turns he is making, there is so much pressure coming up from the ski and the way he's absorbing it and making it happen — it is just like, it is just the way it should be."

Sullivan was echoing what skiers of every nationality and style have said about Miller since he first exploded onto the scene: namely, that they don't understand why he doesn't win every time out, let alone how he does what he does.

Neither, apparently does Miller.

"I would have loved to win, obviously," he said finally. "This is the premier event, and it's something I've thought about quite a bit. But when it's out of your control, that kind of takes the disappointment away, more or less. I mean, I don't think I would change much, the way I skied. I think I skied well enough to win, but it just doesn't happen sometimes."

Copyright : miamiherald.com

Sochi: A monument to Putin's hubris

If one day the people of Russia find the strength and courage to evict Putin from the Kremlin, the seeds will have been sown in Sochi.

If Vladimir Putin could go back in time six and a half years to that day in Guatemala City where he appeared before the International Olympic Committee to convince them to award the 2014 Winter Olympics to Sochi, would he have preferred to pass? At the time, hosting the games was so important to him that he departed from his rule of always speaking Russian in public and gave his speech in English with closing remarks in French. This was his personal project – erecting a display window of the New Russia to the world and transforming his favorite holiday town into an international five-star venue. Since then he spent four years as prime minister, returning in 2012 after constitutional changes that virtually ensure he will remain in power until 2024.

On Friday, as he opens the games, that dream will become reality but this was hardly the picture he had planned to present. Even if the Olympics come and go without a suicide bombing and the snow collected last year from the mountains above Sochi is enough for a couple of weeks' skiing, these games will go down in history for having taken place in the shadow of terrorism, suppression of ethnic minorities and homosexuals, deprivation of local residents, pollution of nature reserve and water sources and inconceivable waste of 51 billion dollars - four and a half times the original budget, which were squandered mainly on corrupt contracts to Kremlin cronies and infrastructure that can barely supply sufficient power and drinking water to the Olympic villages.

And yet, nothing seems to touch Putin. Not a muscle moves in his serenely expressionless face as he continues his PR tour, skiing, playing ice-hockey and petting snow leopards in the Sochi zoo. No one threatens him. The temporary stand-in for president, Dmitry Medvedev has been swiftly cut back down to size; the oligarch who dared to defy him, Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed for a decade and is now a broken man in exile. The shining chess grand-master Gary Kasporov proved to lack any real support and continues to criticize Putin mainly from outside of Russia. The new champion, Alexei Navalny is already being forced to contend with corruption charges and a clever smear-campaign tainting him with allegations of nationalist racism. No one imagines a real challenge to Putin in 2018, though Putin would probably welcome a candidate who will give the elections at least the appearance of an open competition.

Even outside Russia he seems to rule. Russian pressure prevented Ukraine from signing a key agreement with the European Union and in Georgia the presumptuous Mikheil Saakashvili has been dumped in favor of a more pliable president. Putin's vision of a customs union of former USSR republics is evolving, not into a full return to the Soviet empire, but at least into an infrastructure for a Russian-led rival to the EU. Further afield, in Syria, Putin has prevented the West from attacking the Assad regime and preserved Russia's influence in the Middle East.

But Putin is under no illusions. He knows that with its ageing population and reliance on income from oil and gas which will probably not rise in price over the coming decade, Russia is on the brink of major financial catastrophe. And despite his previous success in ruthlessly putting down the Chechen rebellions, Islamist terror within Russia's borders has simply shifted place and shape – and has by no means disappeared. On the international stage he is fully aware that his achievements have mainly been due to the weakness of the Obama administration and the Eurozone crisis.

Putin's biggest asset was always his strongman image; the only one capable of ensuring stability and security, preferable in the eyes of most Russians to a weak democratic leader. The Sochi farce won't bring him down but it has already cracked that image despite the fawning broadcasts by the Kremlin-controlled television channels, the painting of the wasteland around Sochi in green, and the high wooden fences hiding the slums from view - not even a gold medal for Russia's ice hockey team could obfuscate the farce.

The most surprising discovery last week in Sochi was the readiness of the city's residents, those who may have been expected to be grateful for the massive investment, to complain of the broken promises and mirage of progress Putin built upon their backs. And they blamed him directly - not the oligarchs, not the corrupt officials nor the Chechen terrorists. With the last independent television channel remaining in Russia about to go out of business and environmental activists hounded out of the city and forced to leave the country, the protests have emigrated to the internet and to social media, and they cannot be tucked away.

In sixteen days the Olympic torch will go out and the inevitable transformation of most of the Olympic venues and athletes' villages into ghost-towns will begin. In a few years what will remain will be a monument to the hubris of one leader. It happened in other cities that hosted Olympic games. Sochi is not the first and certainly not the last place where billions were sunk to pay for fleeting glory. But the damage these games have caused Putin will not be wiped away. If one day the people of Russia find the strength and courage to evict him from the Kremlin, the seeds will have been sown in Sochi.

Copyright : haaretz.com