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Kildow fourth at World Juniors

Daily Staff Report

In a World Junior Championships race Thursday where the top four women were just 0.05 seconds apart, Julia Mancuso finished third, her seventh World Juniors medal, with Vail’s Lindsey Kildow fourth in super-G.Italy’s Nadia Fanchini and Andrea Fischbacher of Austria tied for gold and American Kaylin Richardson was a surprise eighth.Swede Hans Olsson won the men’s super-G by more than a second. American Jeff Harrison had the top U.S. result in 12th place in Maribor, Slovenia, which is holding the World Juniors for the first time since 1992.Mancuso’s medal puts her one back of Germany’s Maria Riesch, Tuesday’s downhill gold medalist, and Austrian Sabine Ginther, who won eight medals (six gold) in the 1987, “88 and “89 World Juniors.Fischbacher and Fanchini deadlocked for the gold medal in 1 minute, 26.79 seconds with Mancuso – who already had three World Juniors gold medals, a silver and two bronzes in three previous championships – finishing in 1:26.80.Kildow, silver medalist behind Riesch in downhill Tuesday, was timed in 1:26.84, Richardson in 1:27.70.No placeto gain time”It was a great day, a great race … and Julia and Lindsey were right there,” said U.S. team leader Walt Evans, the U.S. competition director. “All the U.S. girls had an outstanding day, but Julia and Lindsey really showed the way.”It’s an unforgiving course, a flat course where you can’t make the slightest mistake and those two and Kaylin really laid it down. How do you look back and see where you might’ve lost a hundredth of a second, or five hundredths? It was great racing.”The super-G was held from the same start as Tuesday’s downhill but it had several more control gates, according to rules. With the flat terrain,”Skiers really had to be on it because you had no place to make-up time,” Evans said.As tight as the women’s race was, the men’s was a blowout. Olsson won with a time of 1:17.49 while Canadians packed the next three places. Manuel Osborne-Paradis took silver in 1:18.54 with Francois Bourque, the downhill bronze medalist, third again, this time in 1:18.63, and Brad Spence was fourth in the blockbuster field of 105 men.Racing resumes tonight with the women’s slalom. The men race giant slalom Saturday and everything concludes Sunday with women’s giant slalom and then men’s slalom at night plus the combined calculation which, at World Juniors, includes slalom, GS and downhill.


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