Kalle Palander roars back with giant slalom victory at Alta Badia

Virpi Kuitunen extends winning streak, with fine support from her teammates

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Kalle Palander, Finland's top male alpine skier, took the third FIS World Cup giant slalom victory of his career at Alta Badia in Italy on Sunday and cemented a truly remarkable comeback from injury.
      In what was only his fourth serious outing since a lengthy layoff after anterior cruciate ligament surgery, Palander stormed down the rain-softened course to lead after the first descent, and managed to hold onto his advantage over a high-risk second run, finishing 0.51 seconds ahead of Bode Miller of the United States, with Switzerland's Didier Defago in third.
     
Even though Palander had fond memories of the Alta Badia track from the past - he won his first giant slalom event here three years ago - this was a really striking and quite remarkable victory.
      He rated it accordingly, placing the win up with his very first (a slalom triumph on the fabled Kitzbühel snow in 2003). Not only was it just the fourth time he had pitted himself against the world's best since undergoing keyhole surgery on his left knee in the spring, but his training regimen had been hampered for the past month by a stress fracture to the shin of his right leg.
      The more recent injury did not slow him in the race, where athletes have an appreciably higher pain threshold, but it had caused problems in practice and a general loss of self-confidence.
     
Palander is now leading the giant slalom rankings for the second time in his career. He has 136 points after two of the season's six World Cup races. This was the thirteenth FIS World Cup victory of his career. The other ten have all come in slalom events, further underlining the significance of this latest win.
      Kalle Palander first came to prominence with a sensational slalom gold medal at the 1999 World Championships in Vail, where he bushwhacked the entire field.
      He then more or less vanished from the downhill skiing elite, being somewhat unfairly written off as a "one-hit wonder", until returning to top form in 2003. In that year he seized the slalom World Cup title and took five individual slalom wins to silence his detractors.
     
It was also an excellent weekend for Finland's women cross-country skiers. Virpi Kuitunen continued her recent run of dominating form, taking up where she left off last Wednesday to win yet again, this time over 15 kilometres in La Clusaz in France.
      This victory, her third in successive World Cup races, was if anything the sweetest of all as it was her first-ever triumph in a freestyle cross-country event. In fact, she had never even been on the podium before. Kuitunen has traditionally been stronger in the classic-style discipline.
      Things were made even better by the fact that Finns scored a rare one-two double, as Kuitunen held off teammate Riitta-Liisa Roponen by a slender margin of 0.3 seconds in a mass sprint finish. A third Finn, Aino-Kaisa Saarinen, was back in 7th, but was only 2.8 seconds adrift of the winner.
      This was the first World Cup double for Finnish cross-country skiers since Harri Kirvesniemi and Jari Isometsä achieved it for the men in January 1995.
     
Another Finn who was smiling after the weekend's winter sports programme was Anssi Koivuranta, who was 2nd in Saturday's Nordic Combined World Cup event at Ramsau in Austria, and then took 4th spot in the sprint competition on Sunday.
      The 18-year-old Koivuranta has emerged from the shadow of Finnish No.1 Hannu Manninen this season, and Saturday's result was his second successive visit to the runner-up spot on the podium.
      His recent run of good form means he is handily placed in 3rd place in the overall standings after five of eighteen events. Manninen, winner of the World Cup over the past three seasons, is back in 5th.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Second consecutive win lifts Virpi Kuitunen into World Cup lead (14.12.2006)

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