Central Europe – just like the East Coast of the United States – has had somewhat of a winter draught with minimal snowfall and canceled races to kick off the season. Just yesterday, the FIS announced that the upcoming women’s technical races in Ofterschwang, Germany, were canceled, and today they were officially relocated to Flachau (which will now host a total of three races this season) on Jan. 15 (slalom) and 17 (giant slalom). It’s also beginning to look more like winter with a four centimeter snowfall overnight in Zauchensee, Austria, which seemed to put more speed into Lindsey Vonn’s training run on Friday.

The American took the top spot in the second training run on the shortened Kaelberloch track in preparation for Saturday’s unusual two-run downhill race. Vonn was just 0.28 seconds ahead of Germany’s Viktoria Rebensburg and 0.59 seconds ahead of yesterday’s leader, Tina Weirather of Lichtenstein, who finished their runs in second and third, respectively.

For Vonn, it’s been 15 years since she last raced this style of downhill, but she is ready to take on the challenging course in back-to-back runs.

“It’s interesting that I am the only one who has already done a two-run downhill,” she said. “It was in 2002. I was 17 years old.”

Vonn also told reporters after the first training day that having two runs is a unique challenge for technicians.

“Two runs … it’s not easy for a ski technician, but Heinzy (Heinz Haemmerle) is definitely the best for me,” she explained. “I have always trusted him; the job he does is perfect. We will for sure prepare two different pairs of skis, and we’ll use the fastest ones for the second run.”

Weirather hopes to rely on her giant slalom experience to get ready for tomorrow’s race.

“I am really excited, I’ve done this before,” Weirather said. “I am kind of used to it because of GS, but the approach is kind of the same. You have to go as fast as you can from top to bottom and fight for every hundredth of a second. The top section is really important, there is a long slow turn right off the start where there can be a lot of time difference.”

Lara Gut of Switzerland, who won the most recent World Cup downhill in Val d’Isere, and Nicole Schmidhofer of Austria continue to be contenders for tomorrow’s race, coming in fourth and fifth less than a second off of Vonn.

Aside from Vonn, the United States is represented by eight additional athletes including veteran Stacey Cook, who was eighth in today’s training run, and rookie Breezy Johnson, who skied to 25th place.

Tomorrow is race day with first run starting at 9:30 a.m. CET and second run at 11:30 am CET.

Official Results