The second and final downhill training session took place on the Saslong on Wednesday. James Crawford of Canada set the best time in the dress rehearsal for Saturday's downhill classic.

Crawford set the best time of 2:01.68 minutes and thus moved into the circle of the absolute top favorites in view of the weekend. The 27-year-old has already stood on the podium four times in the World Cup, but is still waiting for his first victory. The Canadian has always performed strongly in Val Gardena/Gröden – he finished the last three Downhill races in fifth place.

Mattia Casse, who was the fastest in Tuesday's training run, also did well the second time and finished second, eight hundredths of a second behind. An interesting fact: until the penultimate split time, the Italian – who, like Crawford, has not yet won a World Cup race – was still 74 hundredths of a second ahead of the winner of the training run. The Swiss skier Stefan Rogentin completed the top three. He was also only eleven hundredths of a second behind.

In the second training session, many of the favorites were outside the top ten. While last year's winner Dominik Paris of Ulten came in 13th, Austrian Vincent Kriechmayr took 17th place. Gardena-specialist Bryce Bennett (USA) finished 30th, overall World Cup winner Marco Odermatt (Switzerland) only 40th.

Many high numbers are among the frontrunners
As usual in Val Gardena/Gröden, the Saslong also allowed good times for athletes with high starting numbers. This fact is clearly reflected in the results list of the second training run: no fewer than eight skiers with a starting number above 40 appear in the top 20. The best “underdog” was Germany's Simon Jocher in fourth place.

From a South Tyrolean perspective, three other speed racers took on the second training session alongside Dominik Paris: Christof Innerhofer (Gais) came in 26th place one day after his 40th birthday, Florian Schieder (Kastelruth) came in 31st, and local favorite Max Perathoner from Wolkenstein came in 66th.

The complete results list for the second downhill training session can be found here.

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