Nothing is over
CBDN (Brazilian federation) makes their own special ranking to determine who gets the one quota. What I mentioned earlier apparently wasn't right and it looks like this is correct:
- Average of the 5 best FIS points between 1 July 2016 and 22 January 2018, with some subcriteria;
- Maximum of two of those results coming in South America
- At least one of those results coming in the Northern Hemisphere
That is, if I'm translating correctly from the criteria, here. ( @vinipereira @thiago_simoes, am I correct?)
Mourão had no results in South America, so came to Chile to correct that. She's still rather far ahead in the rankings, but her points of today actually don't really make a significant difference (I'd say she has 80% chance to get the ticket, just like I thought before today).
The 25 seconds mean nothing by the way. There were two very hard downhills, on which Bruna fell all the time during training yesterday (they only got hard after the course was changed slightly yesterday). Today before the competition however, she worked hard on learning the 'drift technique' to get through the corners, and in qualifying...it worked! She was only 2 seconds behind Mourão then, but in the last (short, not hard) downhill there was a hole in the track and her ski got stuck, causing her to fall and lose 20-25 seconds.
The final was one big confidence boost, because even though Mourão eventually got the win by basically throwing herself down the downhills like a madman, Bruna for the first time ever saw that on the uphills and flat parts she was actually able to get the better of Mourão
And well, even if 2018 doesn't work out, that's all very promising for 2022, which after all was the first main goal when she started skiing. The fact that she's even in the running for the 2018 ticket is more than was expected when she was first standing on ski's, only three years ago.