After foul weather forced cancellation of two races, Heidi Zurbriggen of Switzerland won a World Cup women's downhill Saturday.
Zurbriggen's winning time was 1 minute, 42.33 seconds, on the 3,010-meter course with a vertical drop of 765 meters and 40 gates.Hilde Gerg of Germany finished second in 1:42.69 and Austria's Stefanie Schuster was third in 1:43.06, .01 second faster than teammate Renate Goetschl.
Pernilla Wiberg of Sweden was fifth in 1:43.10. Wiberg's finish - and a disappointingly slow run for her closest rival, Germany's Katja Seizinger - boosted her overall World Cup lead to 763 points. Seizinger is second with 589 points.
Zurbriggen's victory was the first for the Swiss women's team this season, and she could hardly believe it.
"I did not have a feeling that I was well on my way" to victory, said Zurbriggen, the sister of one of Switzerland's best-ever skiers, Pirmin Zurbriggen.
She attributed her success partly to "a harder boot," explaining that she was faster with that boot during tests.
In a World Cup career that dates to 1985, Zurbriggen has won only one other race, at Lillehammer, Norway, last March - another downhill. Before the Lillehammer race, she was considering retirement.
Seizinger, who had to touch the snow with her hand to keep afoot, was ambivalent about her experience.
"On the one hand I am angry, on the other I am more than happy that I did not take a spill," she said.
Earlier, dense fog in the mid-section of the demanding track forced organizers to end a downhill event that was to have replaced one scheduled at Crans Montana, Switzerland. A previous attempt on Friday also was scrapped because of fog.
In the earlier race, Schuster was leading when the race was halted. She suggested that two races within hours were too much.
"In the second race, I was not able to keep to the ideal line in the bottom part of the track," Schuster said. "The total punch was no longer there."
Saturday's cancellation further complicated attempts by World Cup organizers to stage all scheduled races prior the World Championship at Sestriere, Italy, next month. Bad weather has disrupted the schedule several times this season.
Zurbriggen's victory hung in the balance when the event was interrupted after 25 skiers had completed the race. Despite sharply worsening visibility, organizers gave the go-ahead for another 11 skiers to go down before declaring the race over.