With Miller Disqualified, Unsung Ligety Takes Home Olympic Gold
TURIN, Italy - Ted Ligety once wore a hand-written ad for "Mom and Dad" on his helmet. But that sponsorship space became a lot more expensive yesterday when the Park City, Utah, native won his first Olympic gold medal.
The 21-year-old skier staged an unlikely come-from-behind victory in the men's combined event yesterday, overcoming a 32nd-place finish in the downhill with two spectacular first-place finishes in the following slalom runs to snatch the overall lead. He is the first American skier to earn an Olympic gold medal since Tommy Moe won the downhill in Norway in 1994.
"It's incredible," Ligety told reporters afterward. "I can't believe it [happened] in combined, because I'm not very good in downhill." But, he said, "you've just got to get in the starting gate and throw down whatever you've got."
On the heels of the lackluster downhill performance, Ligety was an unpromising 3.06 seconds out of first place heading into the two slalom races. He won the first of those by posting a blistering mark of 44.09 seconds, then got a massive boost when American favorite Bode Miller and second-place Didier Defago of Switzerland were disqualified for straddling gates. With the top two names erased from the board, Ligety suddenly found himself in third place, about eight-tenths of a second behind the new leader, Austria's Benjamin Raich.
On the second run, Ligety again posted the best time. Croatia's Ivica Kostelic came up a half-second short, and so the young American held his breath as the final threat and slalom guru Raich took to the starting gate. When the Austrian skidded off course about halfway through, the Americans piled onto their unsung teammate and rolled around in the snow.
Ligety, the youngest member of the American team, won his first World Cup medal only last December, a bronze in Beaver Creek, Colorado. After Miller's disqualification, Ligety was the only member of his team in the top 10. Scott Macartney was the nearest, finishing in 16th. It was very nearly another disastrous day for the Americans, who were shut out in Sunday's downhill competition. Instead, it ended in gold.
"It's a great day, especially with Bode skiing out," Macartney said. "Ted stepped up."
Kostelic held on for silver and Austria's Rainer Schoenfelder took home the bronze.
Despite his command performance, it didn't hurt Ligety that all three defending medalists from the 2002 Winter Games were knocked out of contention: Raich, who won the bronze medal, Miller, who had the silver, and reigning champion (and most decorated Alpine skier in Olympic history) Norway's Kjetil Andre Aamodt, who withdrew from competition after injuring his left knee in Sunday's downhill competition. Another stand-out, Austria's Hermann Maier, decided to spend the day recovering from the flu to prepare for his favorite event, the Super-G, this weekend.
Even before the disqualifications and no-shows, Raich was the hands down favorite. Spectators had been gearing up for a duel between the studied and fluid Austrian and his polar opposite, the freewheeling Miller.
Raich was one of the few contenders who did not participate in Sunday's downhill, opting instead to prepare for the combined. On Monday, he sounded confident.
"Between the sun and the piste, from what we've seen so far, the conditions are perfect," he said in an interview with Italian daily La Repubblica. Yesterday, though, clouds hovered above previously sun-drenched Sestriere, and the slalom course, lit up by floodlights for the evening races, was anything but perfect.
In the early afternoon, Ligety, the only member of the U.S. team to practice on the slope on Monday, knew exactly what to expect."It will be interesting to see how the slalom goes," he told Italian television after the downhill. "The snow is pretty bumpy and there's not a lot of consistency to it."
Interesting it was. In all, 14 of the 56 entries never finished the first slalom run, including Miller.
Miller, who finished a disappointing fifth in Sunday's downhill, had dominated the downhill portion of the afternoon - at one point clocking 78 mph - and sailed through the finish line in 1:38.68, nearly a full second in front of Raich. Flying down the first slalom run, the American seemed on course to earn the team's first gold. But his left ski slipped inside one of the gates, the pole went between his legs, and the judges disqualified him.
"I didn't know until I was in the spinning room [warming up for the second run]," he told the Associated Press afterward. "I saw that I wasn't on the board anymore, and I was like, 'I think I just got DQ'd,' so I called and they said 'yeah.' "
Miller's coaches did not protest the decision. It was a familiar situation for the free spirit from New Hampshire.
"I've straddled probably more times than most people have finished the slalom," he said. In fact, the record shows that Miller has only finished two of the seven World Cup slaloms he's entered.
Miller will have another chance to stake his claim as the world's best skier when he takes on Maier in the Super-G on Sunday, and in the giant slalom next Tuesday.
