Ski racer Linus Straßer (Munich) took the podium finish at the parallel slalom in Stockholm and takes a lot of momentum to the Olympic Games. The 25-year-old won the small final against Luca Aerni from Switzerland on Tuesday evening, with eight hundredths of a second making the difference after two races.
The Swiss Ramon Zenhäuser celebrated in the last race before the winter games in Pyeongchang (9th place) with a big success. till 25. February) surprisingly his first World Cup victory, in the final he beat Andre Myhrer from Sweden.
Strasser thus confirmed his status as a specialist for city events: In the pre-season, he had clinched his only World Cup victory in Stockholm to date, and on New Year’s Day he finished third in Oslo am Holmenkollen. The Munich rider was only entitled to start on Tuesday because he took the quota place of the injured Felix Neureuther.
At the third edition of the race on the Hammarbybacken, a 93.5-metre-high artificial hill in the Björkhagen district of Björkhagen, Straßer impressed right from the start: In the last sixteen, he won easily against Henrik Kristoffersen (+0.28) from Norway, in the quarter-finals he won against Sweden’s Mattias Hargin (+0.13). Only in the semi-finals did he have to give himself Zenhäuser a tenth of a second.
The World Cup leader Marcel Hirscher, however, could not use the early out of Kristoffersens to win the slalom World Cup. The Austrian failed in the quarter-finals, the decision in the fight for the small crystal ball was postponed to the Olympic Games.
In the case of women, an early decision was ruled out from the outset. The overall leader Mikaela Shiffrin from the USA had decided not to start in Stockholm to prepare for Pyeongchang.
In the absence of last year’s winner, Nina Haver-Löseth from Norway prevailed and celebrated the second World Cup victory of her career. In the final she beat Wendy Holdener (Switzerland). Third place went to the Slovakian Petra Vlhova.
As the best German, Christina Geiger (Oberstdorf) was almost a second behind Holdener in the quarter-finals. The Swiss player had already beaten Lena Dürr (Germering) in the round of sixteen, Marina Wallner (Inzell) had lost to Vlhova at the start.