Beijing 2022: Women’s GS first run complete

The first run of the women’s GS is over, and needless to say, there were some surprises. Reigning Olympic GS gold medallist, Mikaela Shiffrin (USA) did not complete her first run after falling after five turns. Sara Hector (SWE) is leading the pack followed by Katharina Truppe (AUT) and Federica Brignone (ITA). After starting with bib 21, Nina O'Brien (USA), put in a strong first run to be sitting currently in 6th.

Sara Hector (SWE)
On her first run which put her clear of the field: 
"I am starting to ski my very best. I stayed strong, I stayed in position and I tried to find the joy in it."

On how she will approach the second run: 
"I have been super nervous for a few days. There will be nerves for sure. I will try to keep them controlled."

Tessa Worley (FRA)
On her first run, which left her lying seventh: 
"I am a little disappointed. The snow is very nice, very grippy. But I got pushed out of my rhythm.

"There's a second run, I will push really hard."

Nina O’Brien (USA)
On her strategy going into the runs today:
“I think at an event like this the strategy is just to go for it for me personally.

“I’m trying to put it all out there and show my best skiing so I’ll try and attack as much as I can next time.”

Mikaela Shiffrin (USA)
On what happened when she fell just five turns into her run: 
"I felt that I was pushing really quite well and attacking. But there was just one turn, I had a small, small mistiming when I really went to push on my edges and that makes all the difference.

"The snow was just incredible to ski on. Oh my gosh, it's just really nice but if you do any small errors you really can't get away with it. As you can see, I got the worst of it on that turn.

"It doesn't happen too often that I am falling. I have been really working on the right timing of my turns and really never thought this was going to be part of the issue.

"But it wasn't because I was holding back, so I can be proud of that. But it's five turns into the Olympic GS, there's disappointment for sure."

On her disappointment:

"The day was finished basically before it had even started but I had really the right mentality and actually I am proud of those five turns.

"I mean huge disappointment, not even counting medals, but just it's a really fun hill and good conditions."

On the reasons why it all went wrong:

"I think there's a lot of questions that will be asked and I think many people are going to say, 'what went wrong this entire time?'

"We can go back to right after Solden (world cup event in October 2021) and rather than being able to train, being stuck inside because of a back injury. We can go to the 10 days I've had to take off in quarantine and missing training there.

"We can go to a lot of different places in the season where we can put the blame but the easiest thing to say is that I skied a couple of good turns and I skied one turn a bit wrong and I really paid the hardest consequence for that."

On how she is going to move forwards:

"I am not going to cry about this because that is just wasting energy.

"My best chance for the next races is to move forward, to re-focus - and I feel like I am in a good place to do that.

"I don't know about the medals. I know that my skiing is good and I know even my GS skiing is good, but there we have that (today). So, you just don't know what's going to happen. I am going to do my very best to keep the right mentality and keep pushing."

The second run of the women’s GS is scheduled to start at 14:30 local time / 07:30 CET.

Quotes courtesy of Olympic Information Service