Super G, Women

The women’s Super G was the third Alpine skiing event for women in Beijing and their first speed event. In the ongoing Super G World Cup season, seven races had been already contested. The Italians had won six of them with Federica Brignone (St. Moritz 2, Zauchensee, and Garmisch-Partenkirchen), Sofia Goggia (Lake Louise and Val-d’Isère), and Elena Curtoni (Cortina d’Ampezzo). The other winners had been Lara Gut-Behrami (St. Moritz 1) and Conny Hütter (tied with Brignone in Garmisch-Partenkirchen). The standings saw Brignone in the lead followed by Curtoni, Goggia, and Tamara Tippler.

The Crystal Globe winners in Super G in the years before the Games had been Gut-Behrami (2021), Corinne Suter (2020), Mikaela Shiffrin (2019), and Tina Weirather (2018), while the last two world champions had been Gut-Behrami (2021) and Shiffrin (2019). Ester Ledecká, the gold medallist in this event from PyeongChang, was again present in Beijing and had already won a gold medal here with her win in the snowboarding parallel giant slalom. Unable to start in this race was Goggia, who was still recovering from a fall in the World Cup Super G in Garmisch-Partenkirchen on 22 January 2022. She forfeited this race to focus on the downhill, which was scheduled four days later.

Ledecká with bib number 2 set the early pace only to be overtaken by the next starter Mirjam Puchner, by 0.21 seconds. The next two, Michelle Gisin and Tippler, placed between them with Gisin only 0.08 behind Puchner and Tippler another 0.03 seconds behind. Two racers later, Gut-Behrami with bib number 7 set the best time and took the lead from Puchner by 0.22 seconds. The top five places did not change as all the favourites failed to jeopardise those times, with neither Brignone, Curtoni, Hütter, Shiffrin, nor Suter coming near to a podium place.

Gut-Behrami won the race with an average speed of 97.16 km/h and 5.92 metres ahead of Puchner. For the first time in Beijing, three different manufacturers reached the podium, with Head again winning gold and Atomic and Rossignol taking the other medals. Gut-Behrami won the first ever gold medal for Switzerland in this event, who had only previously won a solitary silver medal, while Austria had won at least one medal in each of the last five editions. Only a few minutes before Mirjam Puchner went down with bib number 3, her brother Joachim Puchner skied down the track with a camera for Austrian television.