Lindsey Vonn‘s first race of the world championships lasted about 40 seconds, as she nearly lost a ski pole, and ended with a DNF.
Vonn, showing she’s still recovering from breaking her right upper arm in November, struggled to hold onto her right ski pole early in her super-G run and skied off course, but didn’t crash, in St. Moritz, Switzerland, on Tuesday.
She was .02 behind Austrian winner Nicole Schmidhofer at her last split time before skiing out.
“I was definitely distracted for about five gates there, I couldn’t get my pole back,” Vonn said on NBCSN, adding that she’ll duct tape her hand to her pole for her final two races this week. “I didn’t know whether I should just drop it or keep trying to get it, but I kind of had a little bit of a grip on it.”
Schmidhofer was the surprise gold medalist by .33 over Liechtenstein’s Tina Weirather, who both earned their first Olympic or world medals. Pre-race favorite Lara Gut of Switzerland took bronze, .36 behind.
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Vonn, who bagged super-G bronze at the 2010 Olympics and 2015 Worlds, isn’t 100 percent back from breaking her right upper arm in a Nov. 10 training crash. She called it the most painful injury of her career and said Sunday that her right hand movement was so limited that she couldn’t put her hair in a ponytail.
“I was attacking, and at world championships only a medal counts,” Vonn, who returned to race three weeks ago, said on NBCSN. “I’m still in a good mood, I’m still smiling, because I attacked.”
Vonn will next compete in the super combined on Friday, but her best medal shot is in the downhill on Sunday. Vonn said she’s had about four days of super-G training since September, with more recent experience in downhill in that time, including a World Cup win Jan. 21.
Austrian Anna Veith, the reigning Olympic and world super-G champion, also failed to finish Tuesday, skiing out about one minute into her run after being .17 back at her last split time. Veith is coming back from tearing the ACL and patellar tendon in her right knee in an Oct. 21, 2015 crash.
Winner Schmidhofer and silver medalist Weirather share a bit of history. At the 2007 World Junior Championships, they also went one-two in the super-G.
Both Schmidhofer and Weirather were at the Sochi Olympics, but neither raced.
Schmidhofer was passed over for Olympic downhill and super-G selections after training runs, as nations can enter no more than four racers per event and Austria’s team is very deep. Schmidhofer also made the Vancouver Olympic team and failed to finish her only race there. The 27-year-old has never won a World Cup race in 106 starts, but owns two podium finishes.
Weirather, the daughter of Olympic and world champion ski racers, crashed in a Sochi Olympic downhill training run, suffering a right knee injury that ended her season. She tore her right ACL three times but has somehow won six World Cup races.
Gut has won three of the four World Cup super-Gs this season, and is Switzerland’s biggest skiing star as the reigning World Cup overall champion. She came to worlds with five previous Olympic or world championships medals, but none of them gold. The super-G was her best shot, but she’s also a medal threat in the super combined, downhill and giant slalom.
“I couldn’t really ski the way I wanted,” Gut said. “I had a little bit of a fight on the slope.”
The World Championships continue with the men’s super-G on Wednesday (6 a.m. ET, NBCSN, NBCSports.com/live and the NBC Sports app).
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