Ted Ligety celebrates his fifth World Cup victory in giant slalom

In the last race of the season, Felix Neureuther decided the World Cup in favor of the American, because he was one hundredth of a second ahead of Marcel Hirscher in 4th place and Hirscher therefore lacked the necessary points.

by B. Fleckenstein

Olympic champion Ted Ligety had trouble getting up to speed in the first run. The steep slope and the snow gave him a hard time and so he only just managed to take the lead ahead of Fritz Dopfer. Felix Neureuther has improved a lot in this discipline. This became clear to everyone with his first run, in which he took the lead with 13 hundredths of a second ahead of Ligety.

The only Swiss was Carlo Janka, who placed twentieth. His comment afterwards: "I'll try to sneak into the top 15 in the second run:"

Aksel Svindal with his unfortunate failure, gave the 8th placed Marcel Hirscher the early overall World Cup victory. Svindal spoke of fatigue in the head, which caused his problems.

In the second run, the Italian Aliprandini had a good run, which kept him in the lead for a long time. Alexis Pinturault (11th after the first run) started as the last of a group of 4 Frenchmen. He made a dream run which catapulted him to the top with a big lead.

Marcel Hirscher then had to attack fully in order to win the crystal globe in the Giant Slalom. But it was not quite enough and with a gap of 24 hundredths, he waited in second place for the other ski stars. Matt Ollson (SWE), Philipp Schoerghofer (AU), Davide Simoncelli (ITA), Roberto Nani (ITA) and even Fritz Dopfer (DE), who skied so strongly in the first run, were unable to finish ahead of Marcel Hirscher.

With a half-second lead over Hirscher, Ted Ligety set out to win again. He skied cleanly around the poles as usual, always trying to ski on the move, and that gave him the lead at the finish line by a razor-thin margin of 3 hundredths of a second over Pinturault.

Now the suspense could no longer be topped. Because if Felix Neureuther, who was now starting, finished ahead of Hirscher, Ligety would win the World Cup. Otherwise Hirscher would be the beaming winner.

Neureuther went full on attack, as usual, and was only 0.03 sec. behind Ligety at the first intermediate time. After the second intermediate time they were also almost on the same level. But in the gliding passage, just before the finish slope, he must have lost speed. The spectators looked eagerly at the time at the finish, which stopped at 2:15:89 min, a hundredth of a second ahead of Hirscher's time.
Thus, Ted Ligety became the winner of the giant slalom in Lenzerheide and the World Cup winner in the giant slalom. Second in the race was Alexis Pinturault and third Felix Neureuther.

When asked if he believed he could win the crystal globe, Ted Ligety said." I knew it was possible and I just wanted to have this one."