Beat Feuz takes Kitzbühel downhill win for third time in career

Switzerland's Beat Feuz must love the Austrian resort of Kitzbühel right now.

In his last four downhill races on the world-famous Streif course, one of the FIS Alpine Ski World Cup's classic events, he has now won three, after triumphing again on the Hahnenkamm mountain on Sunday (23 January).

Feuz led his teammate, the young hotshot Marco Odermatt, in a one-two finish having had the best of the conditions for their relatively early runs.

Unlike on Friday, when Norway's Aleksander Aamodt Kilde won on a shortened course starting at the Mausefalle, Sunday's race incorporated the full run down the Streif.

Overall World Cup leader Odermatt, starting seventh, and Feuz, ninth out of the start gates, were greeted by partly cloudy conditions, a calm wind, and good snow and ice conditions with all fresh snow having been cleared away by volunteers overnight.

Both men took aggressive, tight lines down the mountain, with Feuz just getting the better of his teammate in the Zielschuss final section leading into the last jump, the Zielsprung.

Feuz crossed the line in 1 minute 56.68 seconds, 0.21 seconds faster than Odermatt had done two skiers before him.

"I'm happy that I got through without any mistakes from top to bottom," Feuz was quoted as saying after the race. "Of course we Swiss wanted to hit back after Vincent [Kriechmayr] won in Wengen.

"It worked well with Marco and me. You're not always lucky with the [start] number. We had the forecast that it would get warm after all and that the track would attack. We had a good plan and it worked."

Odermatt, for his part, lost time trying to get inside a very tight gate in the Traverse section after the Hausbergkannte jump, which ended the runs of both Otmar Striedinger and Ryan Cochran-Siegle.

None of the other skiers, not even Kilde, was able to threaten the two leaders as conditions gradually deteriorated, with heavy fog beginning to cloud the top of the mountain.

That meant the very first runner on course, Austria's Daniel Hemetsberger, finished in third. His time, some 0.9 seconds slower than Feuz's, was enough to hold off all remaining athletes and see the 30-year-old to a maiden World Cup podium.

With the result, Feuz closes his gap to Kilde in the downhill World Cup standings to just eight points, overtaking Matthias Mayer to move into second. The Swiss skier also improves to fourth place in the overall standings.

The next major downhill race for the men is the Olympic downhill in Yanqing, near Beijing, on 6 February.