Lara Gut-Behrami races to super-G gold as Mikaela Shiffrin regains confidence

Reigning world champion Lara Gut-Behrami of Switzerland broke through for her first Olympic gold medal on Friday in Beijing, winning the women’s alpine skiing super-G while Mikaela Shiffrin finished ninth at the 2022 Winter Olympics.

Gut-Behrami, a three-time women’s super-G World Cup season champion, became the first alpine racer from Switzerland to ever win an Olympic super-G gold, recording a winning time of 1:13.51, 0.22 ahead of silver medalist Mirjam Puchner of Austria and 0.30 in front of Michelle Gisin, also from Switzerland.

“I’ve been hoping I will have that feeling once in my life to win a gold medal at the Olympics. It’s always been tight and I’m just happy that today it happened,” said Gut-Behrami, who won bronze earlier this week in the women’s giant slalom and also won bronze in the 2014 women’s downhill.

But after coming just missing out on the super-G podium in 2014 and 2018, the 30-year-old Swiss said she adjusted her expectations, and that appeared to make the difference.

“I didn’t give up dreaming, but I wasn’t expecting (the win) and maybe that was the key,” Gut-Behrami told NBC Olympics reporter Todd Lewis afterward. “I stopped working for it, stopped hoping for medals. I just started just skiing and realizing I have already achieved a lot. Maybe this was the key.”

For teammate Gisin, the 28-year-old three-time Olympian, even making the Winter Olympics seemed like a longshot just last summer when she lost a good chunk of her offseason training due to mononucleosis. She remembers being so weak at one point that she couldn’t climb the stairs.

“I watched the (Tokyo) Olympics and that was what kept me sane,” said Gisin, whose sister Dominique Gisin tied for downhill gold at the 2014 Sochi Winter Games