Austria's Vincent Kriechmayr claims World Cup season's closing downhill

Soldeu (Andorra) (AFP) - Austrian Vincent Kriechmayr clinched the final men’s downhill of the season on Wednesday with freshly-minted overall World Cup winner Marco Odermatt failing to fire.

Kriechmayr’s fourth downhill win of the campaign was a tight affair, the 2021 world champion edging out German duo Romed Baumann by nine hundredths of a second and Andreas Sander by 0.13s.

Norway’s Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, already assured of the discipline’s small crystal globe, came in sixth, with Odermatt, the downhill world champion, over one second adrift in 15th.

With his 16 points from the Andorran ski resort of Soldeu added to his overall tally Swiss star Odermatt moves on to 1,842 points and in with a shot of breaking the all-time men’s record of 2,000 points set by Hermann Maier 23 years ago.

Odermatt secured the overall title with his second giant slalom win inside 24 hours in Slovenia at the weekend.

He has two races left to beat Maier’s benchmark, a Super-G on Thursday and a giant slalom on Saturday.