Lake Louise (AB), Canada – Park City, Utah’s Ted Ligety led four U.S. Ski Team athletes into the points on Sunday, finishing fourth in the Audi FIS Alpine World Cup super G in Lake Louise and missing the podium by a mere .01 seconds. Norway’s Aksel Lund Svindal swept the weekend to move into the World Cup overall lead, joined on the podium by France’s Adrien Theaux and Joachim Puchner of Austria in second and third, respectively.

“My super G has been going pretty well, but I wasn’t expecting much after just flying in and now out. It sucks to miss the podium by one hundreth, but I’m pretty satisfied,” said Ligety, who strategically skipped Saturday’s downhill race and spent the week leading up to Lake Louise training at the U.S. Ski Team Speed Center at Copper Mountain in Colorado. The move translated into his best super G finish since taking second place three years ago and vaulted him into second in the World Cup overall standings behind Svindal.

“When you come up here to do all the downhill training runs and you don’t do that well in the race, then you’ve wasted four days,” Ligety explained. “So my strategy was to get some giant slalom and super G training in Copper before heading up here.”

“Typically we bring Ted up here and he gets three downhill training runs. This time around we decided to keep Ted at the Speed Center in Copper so he could get five or six runs of training each day and it completely paid off, not just today, but I think even more so in the long term,” added U.S. Ski Team head coach Sasha Rearick.

Other U.S. Ski Team results included Andrew Weibrecht at 19th, Ryan Cochran-Siegle 20th and Tommy Biesemeyer 29th.

Erik Guay, of Mont-Tremblant, Quebec, led the Canadian home team for the second straight day on Sunday, finishing just outside the top 10 in 11^thplace. His teammate John Kucera, of Calgary, Alberta, capped a courageous comeback from injury with a 14^th-place finish, almost three years to the day he fractured his left leg on the same hill.

“The amount of miles that these guys have on me right now is huge, and some of this confidence stuff that I have been struggling with in training, just due to lack of time and especially in super G and then on the hill that – you know – took me out three years ago, it was cool that I could come out here. I had a plan – I just wanted to have a good, solid run, take some chances. I did and apparently it looks like it’s going the right way.”

Max Gartner, president of Alpine Canada, praised Kucera’s courage and character.

“For me Johnny’s accomplishment yesterday and specifically today is as good as winning a race,” Gartner said of Kucera, who was 36^th in Saturday’s downhill. “If you’ve been away from the sport for three years you lose your starting positions; you lose your confidence. To get back out here on the mountain where you had your major injury takes so much mental strength and I couldn’t be happier for him. That, for me, was really the performance of the weekend.”

The men’s World Cup tour now moves to Beaver Creek, Colo., for the Audi Birds of Prey races Nov. 30-Dec. 2.

“The whole team got a bump in momentum from this weekend,” said Rearick. “Marco Sullivan’s podium fired us all up and Ryan Cochran-Siegle’s had great performances on both days. We’re taking that momentum home to Beaver Creek.”

“I’m looking forward to getting back to Beaver Creek, it’s such a pleasure to race because they do such a good job with the hill preparation,” Ligety added. “The giant slalom is my priority there, but I’m going to race everything.”

OFFICIAL RESULTS
Audi FIS Alpine World Cup
Lake Louise Winterstart – Lake Louise (AB), Canada – Nov. 25, 2012
Men’s Super G