Team Ireland Winter Olympics: Irish skiers in action

Today saw two Alpine Skiers in action for Ireland at the Winter Olympics, with Jack Gower competing in the Downhill event which was rescheduled from yesterday morning, and Tess Arbez in the Giant Slalom.

Both competitions were based in the Yangqing zone and produced mixed results for Team Ireland. Gower was 31st in the Men’s Downhill, while a clip of a gate resulted in an DNF for Tess Arbez in the Women’s Giant Slalom. This is the third day of the Winter Olympic Games, and the second day of competition for Team Ireland.

The Men’s Downhill event started at an altitude of 2179m with a vertical drop of 894m over a distance of 3152m, resulting in a challenging Olympic course. Starting in 37th place Gower produced a solid clean performance in the race, finishing 31st with a time of 1.47.61, which was 4.92 seconds behind the eventual winner Beat Feuz of Switzerland. Johan Clarey (France) won the silver medal, and the podium was rounded off with Austria’s Matthias Mayer.

Making his Olympic debut the former Junior World Champion in Downhill was disappointed to not have finished higher,

“I’m pretty disappointed with today, but I’m lucky I have more events, and I’ll try and do a better job in the next few days. It’s a great course, it’s a challenging course, the snow makes it a lot easier, but there are tricky aspects to it, so it’s a great Olympic downhill course, and it was fun to ski.”

His favourite event is the Super-G, in which he competes tomorrow. This is a similar event insofar as it is based on speed, but the speed is not as fast, and it is more technical, with the gates closer together.

“I’m definitely skiing a higher level in Super-G than Downhill, so we will see what happens tomorrow, but I will be looking forward to