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Brignone tops super-G, Shiffrin poised for combined slalom / Photo: Fabrice COFFRINI - AFP
Brignone tops super-G, Shiffrin poised for combined slalom
Mikaela Shiffrin was perfectly poised to bag her seventh world gold medal after finishing sixth in the opening super-G of the women's alpine combined in Meribel on Monday.
Shiffrin was 0.96 seconds off the lead time set by Italy's Federica Brignone, who will be gunning for a podium finish to follow up on her Olympic bronze in the same discipline.
Having won five slaloms this season in her charge on Ingemar Stenmark's record for overall World Cup victories, Shiffrin will be confident going into the technical second run, scheduled for 1330 GMT on the same Roc de Fer piste.
Joint second fastest in the super-G, raced in sunny, cold conditions, was Switzerland's Lara Gut-Behrami, who announced her arrival to the elite ski circuit as a precocious teenager when the worlds were last held in France, in Val d'Isere in 2009.
Norway's Ragnhild Mowinckel matched Gut-Behrami's time, at 0.71sec, while another Italian, Elena Curtoni, was fourth (+0.78), just ahead of Austrian Ramona Siebenhofer and Shiffrin.
Two-time Olympic champion Michelle Gisin and her Swiss teammate Wendy Holdener, a two-time former world combined champion who claimed Olympic silver in Beijing, remain in the running despite finishing 1.58 and 1.66sec respectively off Brignone's pace.
V.Kranz--BlnAP
