Swiss skier Odermatt dominates 2nd giant slalom of World Cup season
Canada's Erik Read finishes 25th at Val d'Isère
Marco Odermatt let out a scream and pumped his right fist after finishing a men's World Cup giant slalom Saturday.
The Swiss skier celebrated his third win of the season and seventh overall after dominating the race and winning it by almost six-tenths of a second in Val d'Isère, France.
Austrian skier Manuel Feller finished 1.24 behind in third for his second career podium in the discipline.
Croatian skier Filip Zubcic, who was third after the opening run, skied out halfway through his second run, and GS world champion Mathieu Faivre was more than two seconds off the lead in eighth.
"Amazing, I don't know what to say. This is a really cool victory today," said Odermatt, who had two podiums including a super-G win in Beaver Creek, Colorado, last week.
"Probably the worst preparation on a race I ever did and to manage to still ski like this, it's a good mindset. Yeah, this is really cool," he added.
Odermatt also triumphed in the season-opening giant slalom in Austria in October and became the first male skier to win the first two GS races in a season since Ted Ligety achieved the feat in 2013.
'I tried to have a clever run'
Canada's Erik Read finished 25th overall.
Course workers moved up to 50 centimetres of fresh snow out of the race line in the early morning hours.
"We all knew that it would be very tough, that it would be a fight. I tried to have a clever run: a little bit aggressive and only pushing where possible," Odermatt said after his first run.
The Swiss skier leads the overall standings with 446 points, 136 ahead of Matthias Mayer and 217 ahead of Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, who both sat out Saturday's race.
Pinturault trails by 241 points in fourth.
Adrian Pertl, last season's world championship silver medallist in slalom, hooked a gate with his left ski in the first run. The Austrian ski federation said Pertl was taken to a hospital with a suspected knee injury.
The race weekend in the French Alps ends Sunday with a men's slalom.
