Alpine Skiingmen's world cup
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At 30 years of age, a highly anticipated talent seems to have reached maturity. The three fifth places in super-g in the last season could only be an aperitif of the future. Word of Dominik Paris ...
Monday 20 April 2020 6 minutes reading time
Junior world champion downhill in Megève 2010, Mattia Casse has always been considered an unexpressed phenomenon at the highest levels of the white circus.
It took several years to see him again fighting for the top and podiums in the World Cup, but now the '90 class of Moncalieri seems really ready to catch those results that everyone has been waiting for for some time. The first podium in the maximum circuit has been caressed several times in the last season, but let's take a step back in the analysis of Mattia's growth.
The first big achievement in CdM came on December 5, 2015, in the famous super-g of Beaver Creek which saw Marcel Hirscher obtain his first and only victory in the discipline; race shortened to just over a minute on the Birds of Prey and reduced speed, with the blue finishing fourth (ex aequo with Adrien Theaux) a few cents from Weibrecht, which colors the podium for two thirds with stars and stripes given that Ted Ligety will finish second.
Then what happened? Not even two months later the seventh place in the Kitzbuehel super-g, a good pre-Olympic in Jeongseon and an okay season finale, before the 2016/17 vintage starts ... very bad. Casse no longer finds the thread of speech with speed, he is always far from the first and at the World Championships in St. Moritz he also suffers a serious injury, with a fracture to the malleolus of his right ankle that will force him to return under the knife as well during the next summer.
Yes, he will already be back for the races in Val Gardena, but without an Olympic qualification and with morale under heels, another season flies away and for 2018/19 it is difficult to get an idea of the Piedmontese possibilities. The start is cautious, but good sensations come during the winter and, after returning to success in the European Cup (Wengen's descent, fifth seal of his career in this circuit), here is the 8th place in his beloved super-g, in this case at the Are world championships.
And after a smooth summer, Casse can land in Lake Louise really ready to prove his worth, at the beginning of the 2019/20 season: 5th place in super-g, just 11 cents from the third step of the podium occupied on an equal footing by Kriechmayr and Caviezel. It is the second best result ever since that famous day in Beaver Creek, repeated on two other occasions in Kitzbuehel and Saalbach, always in super-g; it is the continuity found by Mattia, however, to convince about the solidity of a now mature athlete, not surprisingly sixth in the ranking of the specialty World Cup.
Downhill something was missing in the race, after quality tests, with the top ten touched in Kvitfjell (in the last race the top in specialty with 13th place), in Kitzbuehel and Wengen again in top 15. And if a certain Dominik Paris, with a precise question on the legacy left to his teammates after the serious injury before Kitzbuehel, replied that "Mattia Casse has every chance to play the top positions in every race", then the pass to heaven is already in the hands of a boy called to become a reference too.
It remains only to use it at its best.
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