(Killington) Fiftieth and dead last in the first round, Sarah Bennett spent long minutes at the bottom of the track mulling over her descent on Saturday morning at the Killington World Cup giant slalom.
Posted at 6:32 p.m.
Dismayed, the Stoneham skier could not explain her delay of 8.33 seconds over the leader Mikaela Shiffrin.
“I just wasn’t able to edge the ski,” whispered the 23-year-old young woman. I haven’t really done any training on a surface that looks like this since September. I don’t know what happened. »
Bennett came from Mont-Édouard, where she skied sloche with the local club. The routes were no more than ten doors long. Excluded from the Canadian team after her first real World Cup season last winter, she is fending for herself this year. She had planned to compete in Nor-Am Cup events in Colorado, but they were canceled due to lack of snow. Since space was available for the Killington giant, she drove from Stoneham to Vermont.
PHOTO MARTIN TREMBLAY, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Sarah Bennett during training on the Mont-Tremblant track last April
“It’s difficult, that’s for sure, but I have no excuse for the performance I just had,” said the woman who until recently announced herself as a great hope for Quebec skiing. “It’s really embarrassing. I wasn’t ready to do the World Cup and I knew it, but at that point I didn’t think so. However, I felt good before coming. That’s why I don’t understand at all what happened. It’s a performance to forget, I don’t know what to say. »
Bennett, who was 16e departure for the World Cup, is flying today to British Columbia in anticipation of the Nor-Am Cup scheduled for Panorama in December.
Lamontagne stops after a few doors
Nobody saw what happened with Justine Lamontagne in that same first round. Setting off just after Bennett, the skier from Mont-Sainte-Anne, who was making her seventh World Cup start, was stopped after a few gates. This is where the one wearing bib 60 appeared on the giant screen.
Making a brave face against bad luck, she stopped a little further down to take a photo with a former coach, Claude Marquis, a volunteer member of the “French connection”, a team of course smoothers.
“I slipped on the inside ski towards the fifth gate and I straddled the outside gate on a crossbar,” recounted the 22-year-old athlete under the eyes of his parents who came to encourage him from Saint-Ferréol-les -Snows. “I just didn’t put pressure on my outside ski and I slipped. I didn’t give myself a chance to ski and get to the bottom, like last year in slalom. That’s what’s disappointing. »
Barring a change in the World Cup schedule, the environmental engineering student at Montana State University must now turn her eyes to the next giant slalom scheduled for Semmering, Austria between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
