She skied in front of her native audience. Winning the race. And I rise to first place in the standings.
Julia Scheib could hardly have asked for a better scenario to end her 2025 calendar year, just weeks before the Cortina Winter Olympics in Milan.
The Austrian won the World Cup giant slalom event on Saturday on home snow near the capital Vienna, beating Switzerland's Camilla Rast by 0.14 seconds and Olympic champion Sarah Hector of Sweden by 0.40 seconds.
Val Grenier of St. Isidore, Ont., finished fourth, 0.77 seconds behind Scheib at Semmering.
Mikaela Shiffrin, the women's record holder with 22 GS wins, finished sixth.
Valerie Grenier of St. Isidore, Ont., finished fourth, missing the podium by less than half a second in Semmering.
“This is crazy, I never thought this would be a win. It was so hard, so bumpy, and I was so relieved when I got to the finish line,” said Scheib, who was two hundredths behind Hector after the first run.
In the final heat, Scheib was behind then leader Rast until the final split, but finished perfectly.
“This is amazing. I heard the crowd before [skied] On the last stretch I heard the crowd and thought I was going to have to let go of my skis,” Scheib said.
Julia Scheib beat her fans in Semmering, Austria to become the GS points leader in 2026.
Alice Robinson, Scheib's main GS rival, retired in the first run, allowing the Austrian to overtake her and enter the Olympic year with an 88-point lead in the discipline standings, having won three of the five GS races this season.
A two-time winner this season, Robinson set the fastest split time in the first run before losing her balance and sliding off the track in the left turn.
“I was unlucky, I lost my balance, I applied pressure in the wrong place and I just fell on my face,” Robinson said. “I’m very disappointed that I didn’t come away with any points.”
Shiffrin tries to return to GS form
Shiffrin, who won the race at Semmering near the capital Vienna four times between 2012 and 2022, finished 1.45 seconds behind Scheib.
Having dominated slalom this season with four wins in as many races, Shiffrin is still trying to regain her GS form, more than a year after she suffered a deep puncture wound to her side and a serious injury to her obliques in a serious crash at a race in Killington, Vermont.
“So far this season, the second race has been perhaps the biggest challenge for me. I was actually really scared,” Shiffrin said, referring to the afternoon darkness on the shady side of the mountain.
“I knew it was going to be bumpy from the first run and after the first run I didn't feel like I could handle it again,” said the American, who was eighth after the first run. “So I changed the mentality in the second run, just to try to be as smooth and soft on the surface as possible. So it won’t be the fastest ride or the most powerful turns, but I felt a lot more in control in the second run.”
The American star, a 2018 Olympic champion, has not finished on the giant slalom podium in her last 10 races, the longest streak of her career since the first 15 GS races of her career without a top-three finish in 2010-11.
Shiffrin's teammates Nina O'Brien and Paula Molzahn were involved in terrible accidents. O'Brien slid off the track in the first run and Molzahn fell and hit her head on the snow in the second run, but both apparently escaped injury.
Watch the World Cup giant slalom decider in Semmering, Austria.
Before the start of the season, the Austrian women's team had not won a World Cup giant slalom event for more than nine years. Scheib completed the draft last October at the season-opening race, also in Austria, and added another win at the final GS round in Tremblant, Quebec, three weeks ago.
And while her three wins make her a strong medal contender in the Olympic giant slalom race on Feb. 15, Scheib already had big plans.
“I want to keep it going, but I also want to focus a little bit on the super-G,” she said.
Hector, the reigning Olympic GS champion, was aiming for her first victory in almost a year. The Swede has seven career World Cup victories, all in giant slalom, but has not won since winning the race in Slovenia on the first weekend of January.
“Julia skated very well, I pressed the brakes a little, you can’t do that,” Hector told Austrian television.
A slalom on the same course is planned for Sunday. Watch live on CBCSports.ca and CBC Gem starting at 8:15 a.m. ET.
