Tanja Poutiainen makes Finnish slalom history

Kalle Palander fails to secure third successive Kitzbühel victory

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It was not a bad weekend to be Finnish. Tanja Poutiainen’s third-place finish in the FIS World Cup slalom event in Maribor, Slovenia was enough to ensure that she wrapped up the World Cup title in this discipline with one race still to go. She is the first Finnish woman to win this coveted crown, and follows Kalle Palander, who won the men’s slalom World Cup in 2003.
      Poutiainen, who is 24 and hails from Rovaniemi in Lapland, has been consistency itself this season after scoring her first-ever World Cup victory on home turf in Levi last February. This season she has missed out on a podium place in only one of her slalom starts, and she has won three times, most recently last week in Zagreb.
     
The Finn's 520 points from her seven slalom starts give her an unassailable lead over Marlies Schild  of Austria (376 points) and Kristina Koznick  of the USA (355 points), rendering the result of the closing Lenzerheide competition in March completely irrelevant.
      Poutiainen’s 3rd-place behind last year’s champion Anja Pärson of Sweden and Janica Kostelic  of Croatia also kept her in front in the overall women’s World Cup standings with 902 points to Kostelic’s 879.
      She also still leads the giant slalom rankings, despite recording her poorest performance of the season in this discipline at Maribor on Saturday. She finished in 7th place and lost ground to her closest rivals Pärson (4th) and Saturday’s winner Tina Maze  of Slovenia. Poutiainen has 381 points to Pärson’s 350. Two races remain.
     
Tanja Poutiainen’s achievement is a considerable personal triumph over adversity, in that her career as a promising junior was blighted by two broken legs, in April 1998 and October 1999, which kept her out of competition for the better part of two years.
      Until her victory at Levi last year she had flattered to deceive on many occasions, failing to capitalise on good first runs, but in her current form it appears she is almost the only person on the FIS World Cup circuit who does not believe she could even pull off the unlikely feat of winning the overall title, despite taking part in only the slalom and giant slalom disciplines.
      Out of her total of 902 points, just one comes from the Super G - 30th in Zauchensee  on her first and only attempt at the discipline - and none from the downhill events, where she does not participate at all.
      Even if the overall win does not materialise, Poutiainen can look back on an astonishingly successful season already, and can look forward in relaxed fashion to the World Championships in Italy, knowing that any kind of medal will simply be icing on the cake.
     
Her Rovaniemi team-mate and counterpart among the male skiers, Kalle Palander, did not enjoy quite the same fortunes at Kitzbühel on Sunday when he attempted to pull off a remarkable triple of victories there.
      Palander’s performances on both runs were marked by mistakes on a difficult track, and he eventually finished 15th after lying 3rd on the first run.
      Palander’s chances of success in the World Cup have gone, and he will now be concentrating on producing a decent showing in the World Championships, where he can at least be sure of starting without much pressure.
     
The most dramatic Finnish performance among the men came from Jukka Rajala, who was 13th fastest on the first run despite being among the last to go, with a starting number of 67.
      His second run was less successful, and he finished in 21st place. This was still the best World Cup performance yet by the promising 22-year-old.
      Sunday’s race was won by Manfred Pranger of Austria, who removed a large monkey from his back by finally winning his first World Cup race after several near-misses.


Links:
  FIS Alpine Skiing

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