The problem with the old combined was it was skewed heavily into slalom speciallists for a while and the speed guys just threw in the towel. The whole alping skiing has turned into event speciallism except for guys at the very top (and the current #1 Odermatt doesn't do slaloms which makes him vastly different to Pinturault & Hirscher who came from tech to add speed events). Likewise Svindal didn't bother with combined since he didn't do slaloms. The days of KAA and Kjus were over and done with some time ago and FIS realized something had to be done. The parallel team events are not good enough, everyone knows one course is very likely to be better and the event can be manipulated by choice so having two athletes doing their preferred event in Team Combined makes most sense on paper IMO. I'm willing to give it a try going forward.
Ekaterina Alexandrova keeps rolling and takes out #1 seed Aryna Sabalenka in Doha R2 (in a third set TB of all things where she's historically very bad - 5 wins & 19 losses).
I really liked what the slopestyle course offered at these Games. It was a little unorthodox with one rails section, followed by two kickers, then a modified pipe feature and finally two more rails, but it produced some fun runs
Shiffrin comes, Shiffrin wins, a tale old as time
Don't know what to take from today's event. I'm pretty neutral on the gimmick, it wasn't horrible, but it's not the Combined i remember from 20 years ago. Though it is known for everyone of us, that the classic Combined is dead for many reasons, if it's between this and no Combined at all, i would take this doubles format. The added pressure that you a performing not only for yourself is an interesting aspect.
The team event also have one other big problem in my opinion. As long as you had the best male and femaler skiier, it doesn´t matter at all who the two other skiiers are and how poor they would perform because you would always win on the tiebreaker.
Women's Team Combined
Final Results
United States
Breezy Johnson
Mikaela Shiffrin
2:40.89(1:42.11+58.78)
Switzerland
Lara Gut-Behrami
Wendy Holdener
2:41.28(1:42.89+58.39)
Austria
Stephanie Venier
Katharina Truppe
2:41.42(1:42.46+58.96)
Full Final Result HERE
Oh ya, the team parallel event could really use a qualifying run. Unfortunately it’s an even lower prestige event than the combined was so I doubt the FIS wants to make it more demanding on skiers than it absolutely needs to be - they struggled to get big names to compete *at the Olympics*
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