Lindsey Vonn wins second gold, makes more history
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She was bummed after learning she had missed a gate in the Super Combined slalom Saturday after a finish that apparently had won a silver medal.
She was bummed about the one-day delay in the women’s downhill caused by relentless snow Sunday.
But it is a mark of just how confident Lindsey Vonn has become that she simply shrugged that off and put together a flawless run today to win the downhill title at the world championships in Val d’Isere, France.
‘It was a tough day for me,’’ Vonn said. ‘We’ve had two days off, and I have kind of been thinking about the Super Combined, being disqualified there.
‘I was actually really nervous in the start, but my husband was there, and he really calmed me down and got me in the right mood for fighting and attacking. That’s what I did.’’
It gave Vonn another place in the history books as the first U.S. woman to win more than one gold medal in a stand-alone worlds since the event began in 1931. (Andrea Mead Lawrence won two golds at the Olympics in 1952, when the Olympics counted as a worlds.) [The year of Andrea Mead Lawrence’s double gold win was corrected at 2:30 p.m.]
It also tied Vonn, who won two silvers in 2007, with Tamara McKinney as the most decorated U.S. woman in worlds history (four medals).
‘I live for a moment like today,’’ she said after joining former U.S. skiers Picabo Street (1996) and Hilary Lindh (1997) as world downhill champions.
Meanwhile, Bode Miller put himself in contention for a medal in the Super Combined today with one of his typically hair-raising downhill runs. Miller somehow kept himself on the course at the top to finish just 4/100ths behind Aksel Lund Svindal of Norway.
France’s Jean-Baptiste Grange, the World Cup slalom leader this season, was expected to be the leading challenger to Svindal and Vonn in the slalom leg later today after losing just 1.4 seconds in the downhill.
On a women’s downhill course with just two compression bumps and little chance to glide in a tuck, Vonn’s extraordinary ability to find the right line and hit the turns perfectly made the difference.
She finished .52 seconds ahead of Lara Gut, the 17-year-old Swiss phenom, and .57 ahead of Nadia Fanchini of Italy.
-- Philip Hersh
