Slalom, Men

The men’s Alpine skiing program ended with the slalom which was also held on the finishing part of the Stelvio. A slalom event had never been held on this slope but some racers had experience from the team combined one week earlier. In the ongoing Slalom World Cup nine races had been held before the Olympics. Norway’s Atle Lie McGrath (Alta Badia and Wengen) and France’s Paco Rassat (Gurgl and Adelboden) both had won two races, while Lucas Pinheiro Braathen (Levi), Timon Haugan (Val d’Isère), Clément Noël (Madonna di Campiglio), Manuel Feller (Kitzbühel), and Norwegian Henrik Kristoffersen (Schladming, the last race before the Games) had one win each. McGrath led the World Cup standings by only one point in front of Pinheiro Braathen with Noël in third. Kristoffersen was the World Champion from 2023 while the 2025 World Champion was Switzerland’s Loïc Meillard.

As in the giant slalom two days before the racer with bib #1 set the fastest run time and held a comfortable lead. This time it was McGrath with Meillard in second, more than half a second behind followed by Gstrein (AUT), Haugan (NOR), and Marchant (BEL), who was more than a second (+1.20) behind the leader. In the second run Meillard and Gstrein shared the best time to place first and second with only the leader McGrath to come, but he straddled early in the course and did not finish, a fate he shared with 56 other racers as 51, or more than half of the field, did not finish the first run. The loss was most painful for McGrath, who skied directly into the nearby forest and sat down in the snow to reflect, later explaining that he needed time for himself after a recent death in the family.

Meillard completed his set of medals with gold after winning silver in the team combined and bronze in the giant slalom. He became only the second ever male Olympic slalom champion for Switzerland after Edy Reinalter, who won the first ever Olympic slalom title in 1948. Starting with bib #31 in the first run was Greece’s AJ Ginnis, who had skied the World Cup circuit for 12 years but never competed at the Olympics because of various injuries. He announced his retirement shortly before the Games, only to ski gently for some seconds before leaving the course, thus finally becoming an Olympian. Meillard raced on Rossignol, while Gstrein used Atomic, and Kristoffersen gave Van Deer, the manufacturer founded by Marcel Hirscher, its first ever Olympic medal.