(The defending champion, Tina Maze of Slovenia, is retired.) Rebensburg is no pretender; she has three World Cup giant slalom wins to Shiffrin’s two this season and could arguably be considered the real favorite. Shiffrin held on to second all the way through the end of the first run, with Moelgg in first and another Italian, Federica Brignone, placing third.
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Shiffrin’s grueling schedule will include the downhill (Feb. 20) and super combined (Feb. 22), and could result in her skiing each of the final 10 days of the Olympics, including training runs.
Shiffrin will now aim to repeat today’s success when she competes in her preferred slalom race tomorrow. This is Austria’s longest gold medal drought in a men’s alpine skiing event, just ahead of the super-G, which is from February 16, 1998, when Hermann Maier won gold.
Combined was the original event at Alpine skiing’s Olympic debut in 1936.
She began her career at home. France’s Tessa Worley, another contender, was undone by a slow first run that left her with too much time to recover. Look out for her to be one of the few multiple winning gold medalists this year. She graduated high school in 2013 but isn’t enrolled in college, though her older brother Taylor is a collegiate skier.
United States ski star Shiffrin, who became the youngest ever Olympic slalom champion at the age of 18 in Sochi, will have to wait until Wednesday’s for her first bid at gold in South Korea.
The latest schedule change came Monday, when the temperature was 5 degrees and the women’s giant slalom was shelved less than three hours before it was supposed to start.
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North Korea’s all-female cheerleading squad, dressed in matching red snowsuits and bobble hats, were in full voice at the Yongpyong Alpine Center to support North Korea’s entry in the Giant Slalom, 25-year-old Kim Ryon Hyang. “It’s insane. There’s so much emotion”, she said. “I usually do some pasta, with chicken and a veggie salad to get some vitamins in there”.
But the Colorado native’s goal of winning multiple golds has become even more hard, following her delayed debut, due to two days of weather postponements. Shiffrin will be up against four-time Olympian Lindsey Vonn in several events.
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“And then there were moments where I thought, who cares?” “And I want to shout: ‘What do you mean, what else? I have a lot of events to do still, so I have to refocus my energy”, she added. Or any of those things.
