Swiss skier Marco Odermatt handles expectations, wins Olympic gold

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Blizzard conditions that made visibility nearly impossible. Overwhelming expectations. An early error that would have thrown a lesser skier off course. Then a 75-minute delay while he was holding the lead midway through the Olympic giant slalom.

Marco Odermatt dealt with all that and more en route to a hard-earned gold medal on Sunday at the Beijing Games that cemented his status as The Next Big Thing in Alpine skiing.

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The overall World Cup leader from Switzerland added to his first-run lead and beat Zan Kranjec of Slovenia by 0.19 seconds.

"It was a hard day, with the conditions, with such a long wait between the two runs," Odermatt said. "It was more than five hours for me. It was such a long time to re-think everything and it was hard to stay focused. I tried to sleep some minutes in between."

Odermatt has dominated in the giant slalom this season, winning four of the five races on the World Cup circuit to lead the discipline standings.

Yet 15 seconds into the race, Odermatt got pushed low and off the racing line and appeared like he might be about to do what Mikaela Shiffrin did in the women’s technical events when she fell early in both giant slalom and slalom.

Marco Odermatt, of Switzerland, celebrates winning the gold medal in the men's giant slalom at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Sunday, Feb. 13, 2022, in the Yanqing district of Beijing.  (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

But Odermatt dug his edges in and used his power to recover in time to clear the next gate. The mistake meant that Odermatt lost more than half a second from one checkpoint to the next but he appeared unfazed and kept charging.

"He almost did what I