Radamus and Winters Medal in WJC Super-G

The men’s World Junior Championship super-G in Davos, Switzerland, proved to be quite the nail-biter. On a challenging day of racing, the American contingent landed their first medals of the Championships with River Radamus and Luke Winters finishing second and third, respectively. Swiss rising star Marco Odermatt took his second gold in as many races, finishing 0.88 seconds ahead of Radamus for the win.

“Luke and I ran two and four,” explained Radamus. “We just wanted to go in, trust our inspection and attack the thing like we knew we could. I just trusted what I knew and trusted my skiing and committed to my line. I got a little squirrely in sections but it paid off and that’s what super-G is all about.”

Following Radamus and Winters into the top 10 was Ski & Snowboard Club Vail’s Kyle Negomir, who charged from bib 35 to finish an impressive seventh place.

“It was a challenging super-G day,” said project leader Chip Knight.”Super-G is one run, inspection and you gotta go. You need a game plan and in some cases adjust to a course report and our guys did that really, really well today. Kyle skied phenomenally well. He’s a solid skier and really executed the line well. From a later start number, he did a great job.”

Radamus en route to super-G silver. Image Credit: GEPA pictures/Oliver Lerch

With high speeds and no training runs the name of the game in super-G, you can expect to see some line errors and misjudgments when racers are pushing their limits. But what made Friday’s race so unique was the number of racers who found themselves on the DNF list. Thanks to a particularly tricky section of the course that only Odermatt managed to navigate without significant trouble, the door was open for many racers to unseat the Americans from the podium.

“There was a section that later was adjusted for that was pretty crucial where Luke and I both made pretty sizable mistakes on,” Radamus said. “We both went airborne pretty hard and barely made it past a gate. We didn’t have a sigh of relief until about bib 40 just because we knew if someone had skied that section well, how much they could have put on the field. Obviously Odermatt did that.”

“It was awesome,” added development team coach JJ Johnson. “Luke ran two and River four, they didn’t get a course report so they made those adjustments on their own which was really cool. After those guys went there was a span of probably 15 guys where maybe two or three finished; it was a little crazy.”

Most nations are lucky to land one athlete on the podium, let alone two. It goes without saying that the U.S. team will be galvanized for the rest of the series and will be hungry to add a few more medals to the collection in the coming days.

“It really shows us all that we’re right there with those top guys,” Radamus said. “We can just let loose and make anything happen here. It got everyone pumped to see some good results and we’re gonna try and keep the momentum going into the tech races and the combined.”

The World Junior Championships continues on Saturday, Feb. 3, with the team event.

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