Marco Odermatt wins season-opening super-G in Colorado, denying Austria podium sweep

Swiss ski star Marco Odermatt started the World Cup super-G season with a U.S. Thanksgiving win at Copper Mountain on Thursday, while Aleksander Aamodt Kilde reduced fiancée Mikaela Shiffrin to tears by making his comeback after nearly two years out.

Odermatt has already won the opening giant slalom — at Soelden in the Austrian Alps last month — in what is an ominous start to the season by the world's best men's skier leading up to the Milan Cortina Olympic Games in February.

The Colorado course is hosting men's World Cup races for just the second time, after 1975-76, and it was the stage for another strong run by Odermatt, who still needed to make up time in the final section to overhaul Vincent Kriechmayr and win by 0.08 seconds.

It denied Austria a clean sweep, with Raphael Haaser a further 0.05 back in third and Stefan Babinsky in finishing fourth.

"I crossed the finish line and I was like, 'That was not too bad.' I hoped the feeling matched the time," Odermatt said. "So I had a great run from the top to the bottom, I had a good plan in my mind … and happy with my performance."

Odermatt, the defending overall champion, has won the Crystal Globe for the season-long title in super-G for the past three years.

For much of that time, Kilde, the 2020 overall champion and winner of 21 World Cup races, has been on the sidelines because of the effects of injuries sustained in a horrifying downhill crash in January 2024.

Switzerland's Marco Odermatt wins the season opening super-G race in Colorado

Nearly 700 days later, Kilde was back racing, and it was all too much for Shiffrin, the U.S. skiing great, who was in the crowd and weeping as he crossed the line 1.25 seconds adrift of Odermatt.

The 33-year-old Kilde wound