Manuel Osborne-Paradis reached new heights Sunday (Nov. 29) in Lake Louise, laying down a commanding run in the opening men's World Cup super G race of the season to earn his first-ever gold medal in the discipline.
The victory also makes the Whistler Mountain Ski Club racer the first Canadian man to stand on top of a World Cup podium in both super G and downhill, according to an Alpine Canada statement.
Osborne-Paradis has six other World Cup medals to his credit, including the gold he won last season in Kvitfjell, Norway, but all of those podiums have come in downhill races. Before Sunday, his best World Cup super G result was a 13th-place finish in Val Gardena-Groeden, Italy, in December 2008.
“I'm feeling great, it's awesome," Osborne-Paradis told The Question on Sunday afternoon, adding that he was pleased to "finally" have a great success in super G. He said it was exciting to have the win come on home snow, in front of many friends and family members and an "awesome" crowd, but it would have been a big personal accomplishment anywhere in the world.
Osborne-Paradis' golden run headlined a banner performance by the Canadian team, as Mont-Tremblant's Erik Guay claimed fourth place and Whistler's Robbie Dixon sped into fifth. But a shadow did fall on the day for the Canadians, as Calgary's John Kucera fractured his left leg in a crash.
After a summer of training in which he and his teammates focused intently on honing their giant slalom skills and technique, Osborne-Paradis said he entered Sunday's super G race thinking he had improved, but he didn't necessarily think a win was in the cards.
“I knew that I was going to be able to charge,” he said, but he "didn't really have any expectations” for what would happen.
As the seventh racer of the day, Osborne-Paradis roared through the course in a time of one minute, 32.93 seconds, to seize the lead and never let it go. Austria's Benjamin Raich and Michael Walchhofer started down the course after him, but fell short of his blistering time. Guay stopped the clock at 1:33.68, just 0.12 seconds off the podium, with Dixon just behind him in a time of 1:33.72.
Though it was a bad day for Kucera, Osborne-Paradis noted that with three racers in the top five, “it's pretty spectacular for Canada. (Kucera) would have been in there too.”
“It just shows that we're going in the right direction, and that our summer training paid off,” Osborne-Paradis said.
Dixon's top-five finish rounded out an impressive week in which he had many observers and teammates talking about how well he was skiing. He sped to an eighth-place finish in Saturday's (Nov. 28) downhill race, just back of Kucera in sixth.
Pick up the next issue of The Question for more coverage.
