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American Ryan Cochran-Siegle celebrates following his run through the males’s super-G on on the Beijing Winter Olympics on Tuesday (Monday PT) in Yanqing, China. Cochran-Siegle took the silver medal. (Picture by Alex Pantling/Getty Photographs)
By DANIELLA MATAR | AP Sports activities Author
BEIJING — Austrian skier Matthias Mayer defended his title within the super-G on Tuesday (Monday evening PT) on the Beijing Video games and added a 3rd Olympic gold medal to his assortment, whereas American Ryan Cochran-Siegle completed second 50 years after his mom received an Olympic gold medal.
Mayer broke Norway’s 16-year grip on the boys’s Olympic super-G title when he received gold on the 2018 Pyeongchang Video games. That was 4 years after he received the downhill title on the Sochi Olympics.
The 31-year-old Mayer additionally earned bronze on Monday within the rescheduled males’s downhill. Swiss rival Beat Fuez received that occasion however skied out close to the highest in Tuesday’s race.
Cochran-Siegle, who's from Vermont, completed second, 0.04 seconds behind Mayer.
“What’s up Vermont? Hope that holds,” the 29-year-old Cochran-Siegle mentioned after crossing the end line.
Cochran-Siegle’s silver medal got here nearly 50 years to the day after his mom, Barbara Ann, received gold within the slalom on the 1972 Sapporo Video games.
World Cup super-G chief Aleksander Aamodt Kilde of Norway completed third, 0.42 behind Mayer, on the course generally known as The Rock.
Marco Odermatt of Switzerland was among the many favorites however he misplaced management on a flip and went out shortly earlier than the tip of the course. Odermatt was slower than Kilde on the remaining checkpoint.
The 24-year-old Odermatt put his palms over his helmet as he skied down after which put his head on the barrier close to the end line. Odermatt, who's snowboarding in his first Olympics, completed seventh within the downhill.
Kilde and Odermatt have dominated the super-G this season. Kilde has received three of the 5 World Cup races within the self-discipline to guide the standings over Odermatt, who has received the opposite two. Mayer is third within the standings.
Kilde continues to be searching for his first win in a significant championship. He was fifth in Monday’s downhill in what was then his highest end in 9 Olympic begins.
For members of Vermont’s “Snowboarding Cochrans” clan, competing in an Olympics is a proper of passage. A household custom.
First, there have been siblings Marilyn, Bobby and Barbara Ann on the 1972 Sapporo Video games, fulfilling a plan hatched by their mother and father, Mickey and Ginny Cochran, within the yard ski space.
Then youthful sister Lindy raced on the Innsbruck Video games in 1976, grandson Jimmy was on the U.S. Ski Workforce in 2006 and 2010 and now Ryan Cochran-Siegle is at his second Olympics.
“It’s all the time cool once I return house simply speaking about what it’s like and having that little sharing session,” Cochran-Siegle mentioned.
So how was it rising up the son of an Olympic champion?
“She’s nonetheless simply my mother,” Cochran-Siegle mentioned. “Most of our conversations are fairly regular.”
That’s as a result of modesty can be a Cochran custom.
In a latest video interview, Barbara Ann mentioned she didn’t even notice that this 12 months marks the fiftieth anniversary of her victory till a reporter introduced it up.
“I hadn’t even considered that,” she mentioned. “It’s been a very long time.”
She hasn’t, nonetheless, forgotten what occurred on Feb. 11, 1972.
“It was a lot more durable for me to rise up on the rostrum than it was to truly race,” Barbara Ann mentioned. “I actually loved the racing. However I didn’t like all the eye that went together with it. I used to be actually, actually shy.”
Competitiveness was by no means a problem for Barbara Ann, although.
“Two years earlier than I had are available in second on the world championships and I noticed the French flag being raised the best and I didn’t like that,” she recalled. “In order that was sort of like a seed that acquired planted for me that I wished to win.”
Win she did – ending forward of two French ladies in Sapporo.
“It was shut. I received the primary run by three hundredths and misplaced the second run by one hundredth and general received by two hundredths,” Barbara Ann mentioned.
For Cochran-Siegle, simply being on the Beijing Video games is an achievement after he was the sufferer of a horrifying crash on the dreaded Streif course in Kitzbühel, Austria, a 12 months in the past. A fracture of the seventh cervical vertebra of his backbone meant that he didn’t get again on skis till Might and didn’t resume full coaching till August. Then he made the dangerous resolution to change ski manufacturers.
A fourth-place end in a super-G in Bormio, Italy, in December marked a return to type in a race the place he had posted his first World Cup victory a 12 months earlier in what was a breakout season – till his damage.
Additionally in December 2020, Cochran-Siegle completed second in a downhill in Val Gardena, precisely a half-century after his mother received a silver medal on the earth championships on the Italian resort.
Maybe involved with the burden of household historical past, Barbara Ann wrote a letter to her son earlier than he competed within the 2018 Pyeongchang Video games, telling him that “medals are actually, very nice nevertheless it’s not all in regards to the outcomes.”
“Benefit from the time that you simply’re there and be pleased with the truth that you’re representing the U.S,” she wrote. “And then you definitely simply go and also you do your greatest.”
In Pyeongchang, Cochran-Siegle’s greatest end was eleventh in large slalom.
“It is going to be a special expertise this Olympics for him. … He is aware of he’s one of many high People, if not the highest man,” Barbara Ann mentioned. “However undoubtedly there’s some potential on the U.S. males’s staff.”
Barbara Ann described her son as “a perfectionist.”
“He research the movies lots and he actually thinks about what it's that he’s making an attempt to do and stuff,” she mentioned, warning that he typically dangers taking it “too far.”