LAKE LOUISE, Canada: Liechtenstein’s Tina Weirather won the women’s World Cup super-G at Lake Louise on Sunday as US speed queen Lindsey Vonn failed to finish. Weirather, winner of the World Cup super-G crown last season, bagged her eighth World Cup victory with a time of 1min 18.52sec.She finished 11 hundredths of a second in front of Switzerland’s Lara Gut, with Austria’s Nicole Schmidhofer third, 0.27sec back. Weirather, second in Friday’s downhill, was fifth on Saturday, and said missing the podium in the weekend’s second race had motivated her. “I was pretty mad yesterday, I lost a lot of time beacuse of the change of light,” she said. “I tried to carry all the anger from the downhill at the start of the super-G today. It worked. When I am aggressive and angry, it is always pretty good for me.” She was especially pleased to have turned the tables on Gut, after being pipped by the Swiss in Canada before. “Coming into the finish I said to myself it’s going be the same as the last two years where I lost the race by a couple of hundreths,” Weirather said. “Lara Gut is the one who was always beating me here, so I was focused on her.” American Mikaela Shiffrin finished fifth, 0.84sec off the pace a day after winning the second downhill of the weekend — her first triumph in a speed race on the World Cup circuit.The 22-year-old Shiffrin, whose worst finish so far this season is a sixth place, leads the overall World Cup standings with 510 points, 172 ahead of Germany’s Viktoria Rebensburg. Vonn, meanwhile, completed a forgettable weekend, which included a hard crash in the opening downhill on Friday and finishing outside the top 10 on Saturday. On Sunday, the 2010 Olympic downhill champion, who has won 18 races at Lake Louise, was caught out by an error and skied off the course less than 20 seconds into the race. Hirscher returns to top of podium: Austria’s Marcel Hirscher, who broke his ankle in August, won the men’s World Cup giant slalom at Beaver Creek on Sunday.Hirscher, the six-time defending overall World Cup champion, finished with a combined time of 2min 37.30secs with Norway’s Henrik Kristoffersen second in 2:38.18 and German Stefan Luitz third. Hirscher earned his 46th World Cup win and his first since he broke his ankle in training. “I did not expect to win here. I knew that I was skiing well, but I still thought I was far from the best times,” said the four-time world champion who in February will try to fill the only void on his resume when he goes for gold at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. With the Games on the horizon, Hirscher has pushed himself to return to form. Third after the first leg on the Birds of Prey course, 39 hundredths of a second behind Luitz, Hirscher delivered a flawless second run. Thanks to a few points garnered in a slalom at Levi, and also to the postponement of the scheduled opening giant slalom in Soelden, Hirscher isn’t too far out of touch in the overall standings. He is in 14th place with 114 points, 135 points behind leader Kjetil Jansrud of Norway, who failed to gain any points on Sunday. The men’s World Cup resumes next week in Val d’Isere, France.
