Sara Hector won the women's Olympic giant slalom on Monday in a race stripped of a showdown with Mikaela Shiffrin after the American slid out in the first leg. Hector, fastest down on the opening run of two, clocked a combined total of 1min 55.69sec to finish 0.28sec ahead of Italy's Federica Brignone, with current world champion Lara Gut-Behrami of Switzerland rounding out the podium. "I really tried to push it and give it all I got.
It's just amazing," Hector said. "It's been so much all day. I've been so nervous.
It's so much feeling, it's crazy. It's for sure a lot of joy." Defending champion Shiffrin's bid for a third Olympic gold medal lasted only a handful of gates before she slipped wide and was unable to regain her line. "The day was finished basically before it even started," the 26-year-old said.
It was a hammer blow for Shiffrin, who also won slalom gold at the 2014 Sochi Games, but the American vowed to quickly refocus on Wednesday's shorter technical event in which she is a four-time world champion. World Cup slalom standings leader Hector, however, lived up to her own billing as one of the favourites, holding her nerve in a drama-packed second run down the Ice River course that caught out many of the pre-race favourites. Norway's Thea Louise Stjernesund took a convincing mid-field lead as Slovakia's six-time world championship medallist Petra Vlhova, 13th fastest in the first run, failed to make any impression in the second, with Austria's world bronze medallist Katharina Liensberger also fading.
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