The Swiss women miss out on the podium in the giant slalom in Kranjska Gora. The best Swiss skier is Gut-Behrami (6th) ahead of Camille Rast (8th). Victory goes to the superior Swede Sara Hector.
The fourth World Cup giant slalom of the winter was won by Sara Hector. In the absence of Mikaela Shiffrin, the 32-year-old Swede wins ahead of Lara Colturi and Alice Robinson. Lara Gut-Behrami came sixth, Camille Rast finished in 8th place.
Hector already led by more than a second after the first run and subsequently extended his lead. Only two up-and-coming talents and the fourth-placed Austrian Julia Scheib with the best time in the second run were able to keep the gap under two seconds. Italy's Lara Colturi (18), competing for Albania and on the World Cup podium for the second time, lost 1.42 seconds in second place, New Zealand's Alice Robinson (23) ten hundredths more.
Lara Gut-Behrami, who competed with a scarf, was still quietly hoping for her first giant slalom podium finish of the winter after finishing fifth in the morning, but failed to improve. "It's not that easy to make the podium in the giant slalom at the moment. I lack the confidence to go all out," said the skier from Ticino, who is still missing a giant slalom victory to complete her historic "triple-double". So far, only Pirmin Zurbriggen and Hermann Maier have achieved a double-digit number of World Cup victories in three different disciplines, and no woman has done so.
Brignone drops out
Sara Hector, the Olympic champion from Beijing, continued her run of improvement this winter with a well-deserved seventh World Cup victory. The giant slalom specialist had to make do with 15th place in the opening race in Sölden after material problems in preparation, in Killington she won on a similarly icy slope as in Kranjska Gora, in Semmering she came second.
Federica Brignone, who had won four of the last five giant slaloms and went into the race as the leader in the discipline rankings, was eliminated in the first run with an inside ski error and is now 96 points behind Hector. Two places behind Gut-Behrami - and 10 and 18 positions ahead of Wendy Holdener and Michelle Gisin respectively - was Camille Rast, who had to cede the lead in the overall World Cup to the day's winner.
The action continues on Sunday in Kranjska Gora with a slalom. The first run starts at 10.00 am, the second at 1.00 pm. The last victory by a Swiss woman on the Vitranc dates back to 1991, when Vreni Schneider triumphed in the Stangenwald.
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