Pinturault claims combined as Paris scorches super-G

Italy's Dominik Paris revealed his depth of understanding of the infamous Hahnenkamm mountain in winning Friday's super-G race in Kitzbuehel, while Alexis Pinturault upstaged local hero Marcel Hirscher to defend his super-combined title.
Paris went into the super-G with some form, the 25-year-old having won the prestigious downhill here in 2013.
And sure enough, the Italian displayed a faultless line down the tricky bottom third of the course to clock a winning time of 1min 09.99sec for his fourth victory on the World Cup circuit.
Austrian duo Matthias Mayer, the current Olympic downhill champion, and Georg Streitberger completed the podium, at 0.06 and 0.34sec respectively.
"I really didn't think of winning today in as much as I wasn't perfect in the upper part," Paris said.
"Going into the traverse, where you have to be tactical, and then the dip to the finish line both went well."
Paris added: "To win twice in Kitzbuehel is fantastic. The first victory remains the stand-out moment of my career.
"Yesterday in the second downhill training session, I felt good arriving down the bottom. And then I had confidence on a snow that seemed similar to that when I had my first win here."
Reigning world champion Ted Ligety was first out of the hut down the 2.1-kilometre-long Streifalm piste, but the American missed a gate after going wide on the last bend, meaning he was also ruled out of the super-combined.
That opened the door for a straight dogfight between France's Pinturault and local hope Hirscher, with Paris also skipping the slalom to focus on defending his downhill title on Saturday.
The 23-year-old Pinturault, the reigning Olympic giant slalom bronze medallist, lay in 25th place after the super-G but clocked 49.90sec in the more technical slalom, run under floodlights, for a total time of 2:01.36.
Hirscher, the reigning world slalom champion, left himself too much to do after a poor super-G showing and had to be content with second spot 0.69sec adrift.
Ondrej Bank of the Czech Republic finished third (+0.94), edging Croat veteran Ivica Kostelic off the podium by three-hundredths of a second.
"My goal is to make a good downhill and then attack in the slalom," Pinturault said of his eighth World Cup victory and first this season.
One of the big pre-race favourites, Kjetil Jansrud, finished seventh in the super-G in 1:10.77, the Norwegian having topped both downhill training runs in the week.
He could only manage 51.80sec in the slalom to finish ninth in the combined and now stands 182 points off Hirscher in the overall World Cup standings.
The super-G was held up after the main racers had come down for a helicopter evacuation of Switzerland's Marc Gisin, who suffered a heavy fall on the testing, icy course.
Racers touched 123km/h in one of the most prestigious speed events in one of the circuit's most iconic locations and there have been some extremely gruesome crashes in the past, notably Swiss racer Daniel Albrecht in 2009 and Austrian Hans Grugger in 2011.
The Swiss team later said Gisin had suffered a minor head trauma which doctors considered was not serious, adding that he had however been transferred to hospital in Innsbruck for monitoring.
Saturday sees the 75th running of the downhill, which made its debut in 1931, with the two-legged slalom on Sunday.
Source: AFP