SWITZERLAND’S Marco Odermatt won the men’s giant slalom of Alpine Skiing at Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games yesterday.

Odermatt, a five-time Junior World Championships gold medalist, finished with 2 minutes and 9.35 seconds to bag the gold. Zan Kranjec of Slovenia finished 0.19 seconds behind to take the silver. French Mathieu Faivre grabbed the bronze medal on 2:10.69.

Odermatt had come into the Beijing Games as current World Cup overall leader and one of the big favorites.

But he has disappointed, having finished seventh in the downhill and skiing out of the super-G, a race in which he was expected to challenge for the Olympic title.

Holding his nerve after going into the second run just 0.04 seconds ahead of Stefan Brennsteiner of Austria, Odermatt roared in delight on seeing he’d won the Olympic title 0.19 seconds ahead of a still delighted Kranjec. The Slovenian claimed silver after a superb second run enabled him to climb onto the podium from eighth place after the first run to a silver medal in a time of 2:09.54.

After a mistake on his second run, Brennsteiner finished well down the field in 27th place.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Odermatt. “It was a hard day, with the conditions, with such a long wait between the two runs. It was more than five hours for me, it was such a long time to rethink everything and it was hard to stay focused. I tried to sleep some minutes inbetween. I actually never dreamed about it but now it still feels like a dream.”

“I don’t fully understand it yet. In Pyeongchang 2018, I was fourth so you never know if you will get another chance to fight for a medal,” Kranjec said of his first run eighth-place finish. “After the first run I said maybe it’s over, I don’t have any more chance. But my second run was really good. It’s unbelievable.

“My family, my friends supported me, they believed in me. I know they are celebrating right now. It’s in the middle of the night [in Slovenia] but it doesn’t matter right now.”

Despite an error, France’s Faivre claimed the bronze medal in 2:10.69, rising an impressive 10 places after the first run.

“It’s been a tough day, it’s been a nervous day, it’s been a long day to the second run,” said Faivre post race. “I didn’t feel really good in the second run actually, it was really tough because of the conditions, because of the surface. But I finished the day with an Olympic medal and I am so happy about it,” he concluded.(SD-Xinhua)