Canadian skier Jack Crawford earns World Cup silver on 2026 Olympic course

Canada's Jack Crawford reached his second alpine skiing World Cup podium of the season on Wednesday, grabbing downhill silver in Bormio, Italy.

Crawford's time of one minute 55.08 seconds left him 0.4 seconds behind Austrian gold medallist Vincent Kriechmayr, who collected his 14th career World Cup downhill victory. Norway's Aleksander Aamodt Kilde finished 0.28 further back of Crawford in third.

The 25-year-old Crawford previously bagged downhill bronze in Beaver Creek, Colo., earlier in December. The Toronto native is also an Olympic bronze medallist after placing third in alpine combined in Beijing. 

The world champion from Austria skied the icy and bumpy 2,268-kilometre run to perfection to win the final men's World Cup downhill of 2022.

Kilde was the World Cup downhill champion last season and won three of the four previous downhills this campaign, with Kriechmayr the only other winner — in another Italian resort, Val Garena, two weeks ago.

On Wednesday, Kriechmayr managed to avoid trouble on the challenging course, which will be used for the men's downhill at the 2026 Olympics.

Despite the many bumps and rolls, he maintained full control and never came off his race line, while most of his rivals struggled on parts of their runs.

"Winning here means a lot. It's one of the classic events and every ski racer dreams of winning them once," said Kriechmayr, who had three previous podium results on the Stelvio without a win.

"Today was definitely my best run here. I was not the fastest in the last section but it was a reasonable run."

After winning three downhills this season and clocking the fastest time by far in Tuesday's final training, Kilde was widely regarded as the favourite.

However, he had no previous top-three