Corinne Suter of Switzerland won Sunday’s women’s super-G in Lake Louise, Alta., after finishing second and third in two downhills.
Suter posted a winning time of one minute 20.75 seconds on the 2.5-kilometre track in Banff National Park.
Austria’s Cornelia Huetter was second just 2-100ths of a second back of Suter.
Huetter was third in Friday’s season-opening downhill. She sat out Saturday’s race because of concussion symptoms stemming from a crash last season.
Ragnhild Mowinckel of Norway placed third in 1:20.91. Italy’s Sofia Goggia was fifth after winning both downhills.
Marie-Michele Gagnon of Lac-Etchemin, Que., finished eighth in 1:21.48 after placing ninth a year ago.
Valerie Grenier of St. Isidore, Ont., returned to Lake Louise for the first time since her fifth-place finish in 2018 and was 31st in 1:22.60.
Toronto’s Candace Crawford was 35th of 40 finishers in 1:23.24 after placing 36th last year in Lake Louise while Stefanie Fleckenstein of Whistler, B.C., didn’t finish the race.
Mental block after downhill crash
She was joined by nine others including Lara Gut-Behrami of Switzerland, who captured her third overall World Cup super-G title in 2021. She won her first World Cup giant slalom in more than six years a week ago in Killington, Vt.
For Grenier, Sunday’s race marked the 26-year-old’s first completed super-G on the World Cup circuit since Feb. 28, 2021 when she was 34th In Val di Fassa, Italy. Grenier had attempted the speed race a few times since without much success after suffering a mental block following a serious crash.
At the 2019 alpine world championships, she broke her right leg in four places and her right ankle travelling about 130 kilometres per hour in a downhill training run in Åre, Sweden. She needed a second surgery five months later when the bone wasn’t healing properly.
She was back on skis Oct. 17, 2020 following multiple surgeries, physiotherapy and COVID-19, finishing 25th in giant slalom in Sölden, Austria.
But it was a different story a month earlier when Grenier stood at the top of a mountain for her first training run post-injury and couldn’t push out of the gate in Zermatt, Switzerland. The crash kept replaying in her head.
WATCH | Grenier suffers mental block upon return from injury:
Italy’s Sofia Goggia finished with a time of 1:28.96 to place 1st in the women’s downhill competition during the FIS Alpine World Cup stop in Lake Louise, Alta.
The mental challenges forced Grenier to abandon thoughts of downhill or super-G and shift to giant slalom, a more technical and slower discipline. She raced 13 times before a disqualification at her second Olympics last February in Beijing after getting caught on a gate just seconds from the end of her first run.
When she attempted a super-G on March 5, a “crazy scared” Grenier pulled up halfway down an icy and bumpy course in Lenzerheide, Switzerland.
“As much as I wanted to fight through it, you can’t when you don’t feel 100 per cent and you’re going that fast,” said Grenier, who grew up in the Ontario farming community of St. Isidore, east of Ottawa. “It was hard [mentally] to [stop] because that’s not me. I’ll keep going through anything, but at that moment there was no way.
“For a long time, it seemed I wasn’t going to get back to my old self.”
Last month in Colorado, Grenier continued her GS training while adding a healthy diet of super-G to get accustomed to speed again and how the terrain “pushes you around,” new Canada women’s coach Karin Harjo told CBC Sports recently. Grenier felt strong, didn’t suffer a setback from back issues that bothered her last season and noted “huge progress” from a mental perspective.
“Being scared is not in my head,” she said, “I’m having fun and thinking about what I’m working on. I feel like myself again.”
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