Snowboard: Riegler gets another small crystal ball at the age of 44

Austria’s alpine snowboarder still had a small crystal ball after the last race of the season. In the mixed team competition in Winterberg, victory on Sunday went to Nadya Ochner and Roland Fischnaller from South Tyrol, followed by Claudia Riegler/Andreas Prommegger and Julia Dujmovits/Sebastian Kisslinger. Riegler and Prommegger won the team ranking.

“This is awesome! It’s so cool to drive the Andi, it’s so much fun to be at the start with him,” said 44-year-old Riegler,”We can generally rely on each other completely, and it worked out great again today. “I’m very, very happy about the crystal ball.”

It was the first win of a World Cup classification for the Salzburg rider. But it might not have been the last, as Riegler wants to continue her career at least another year after the World Cup in Park City.

However, Dujmovits has finished her active career. The woman from Burgenland, whose greatest success was her parallel slalom Olympic victory in Sochi in 2014, had already set the course before the Olympic Games in Pyeongchang. Dujmovits has not yet announced where her professional future lies. She had recently emphasized several times that she wanted to devote herself to projects outside sport.

Sabine Schöffmann and Alexander Payer, who were leading in the team classification before the last race of the season, finished ninth. Schöffmann left the starting gate in the round of 16 against Team Poland 1, but immediately retired due to her serious injuries she had suffered in a crash in Bansko at the end of January. The Carinthian had suffered a fracture of the left fibula and complex ligament injuries in the left ankle joint.

Payer tried to make up for the penalty time imposed for Schöffmann, but failed to do so. With 290 points for ninth place Schöffmann/Payer finished second in the World Cup ahead of Ochner/Fischnaller. The fourth ÖSV duo with Carinthian Daniela Ulbing and Lower Austrian Benjamin Karl reached the quarter-finals and finished seventh in the final standings.