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(Reuters) – Austria’s Vincent Kriechmayr took the men’s Alpine skiing World Cup super-G globe without leaving the starting hut on Thursday after the season’s final speed race in Lenzerheide was cancelled due to fog.
The women’s super-G in the Swiss resort was also cancelled but home skier Lara Gut-Behrami had already secured that title.
The cancellations followed a similar wipe-out of the downhills on Wednesday and pushed Frenchman Alexis Pinturault and Slovakia’s Petra Vlhova closer to the overall men’s and women’s World Cup titles respectively.
Vlhova is 96 points clear of Gut-Behrami, while Pinturault leads Switzerland’s Marco Odermatt by 31 with only the giant slaloms and slaloms to come.
The Slovak is on course to become her country’s first overall World Cup winner.
Odermatt was runner-up in the super-G standings, 83 points behind Kriechmayr, and the two speed race cancellations have dealt a big blow to his hopes of closing the gap on Pinturault.
Kriechmayr added the super-G globe to downhill and super-G gold medals won at the world championships in Cortina d’Ampezzo last month. He was the first Austrian since Hannes Reichelt in 2008 to win the super-G globe.
“It’s sad to lose this race (to the weather) but the feeling now is pretty nice,” said Kriechmayr.
Former world champion Reichelt, 40, announced his retirement on Wednesday and had been due to say farewell as a race forerunner.
The Austrian skied to the finish line anyway, wearing a Tyrolean jacket and lederhosen shorts, after the globes had been handed out. He was then doused in champagne by coaches and team mates.
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Barbara Lewis)
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