Sofia Goggia takes downhill gold; Lindsey Vonn earns bronze

Not like she did in the super-G on Saturday. She will run the slalom portion on Thursday at 1:00 a.m. ET. Vonn was 0.47 seconds behind Goggia.

“I have absolutely nothing to lose”, Vonn said.

“It is time for me to do something else and to focus onto something else”, the Minnesota native, who became the oldest female medalist in alpine skiing at the Olympics, told NBC after the race. She will be 37 years old at the next Winter Olympics. “I love what I do”, Vonn said.

What she also hopes to do, of course, is win a second gold medal in her sport’s fastest event, to go along with the one from the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. In a way, this was her “defense”.

“She asked me how to deal with the pressure and expectation and I told her, which probably helped her”, Vonn said after finishing third behind silver medallist Ragnhild Mowinckel of Norway.

The age thing got a lot of play at Friday’s meeting with the press. “And I think later I’ll reflect on how much I enjoyed it and how much my teammates and my coaches made it special for me”, Vonn said ahead of Wednesday’s contest. But each pointed to the other as the one to watch in the days leading up to the race. Shiffrin offered the United States hope for a bright future even as a legend faded away without a full challenge in her final race.

McKennis came out fast through the first intermediate, 0.11 seconds ahead of the eventual gold-medal victor Sofia Goggia. She now has 81 wins, five behind Swedish legend Ingemar Stenmark. “No mistake”, Goggia said. I thought I executed the line really well. I moved like a Samurai. I struggled to keep the emotions together. Most of us have been injured pretty severely, so I’m really happy and proud to be competing with them and to have their support. She’s a good friend of mine.

She jarred her back in December a year ago in the build-up to the Games, but recovered to compete in a World Cup race a week later. “It was just about myself”, Goggia said. “It’s always an honor to take part in the same race as her”. She wears his initials “DK” on the side of her helmet as a tribute.

“I appreciate everything so much more“, she said. “But he’s here and he’s able to see me win a bronze“. “Maybe it wasn’t like the downhill individual race, but it sure feels good”. “I’m looking forward to cheering on our girls racing in the downhill and to compete in Thursday’s combined”.

“It was tough to contemplate this being my last Olympic downhill race”.

She did not medal in that event after missing a gate in the slalom but put up an impressive time in the downhill portion, skiing far better then she had the previous night in her medal-winning performance. “Gisin’s going to be really unsafe”, she said, labelling Siebenhofer however as the likeliest “toughest competitor” come the slalom scheduled for 3:00pm (0600 GMT).