2010 Alpine Juniors underway in Mont Blanc

4th February 2010

The FIS Alpine Junior World Ski Championships 2010 opened in the Mont Blanc region of France on Sunday. During this week, 350 young alpine ski racers from 40 nations will be competing for medals in downhill, super-G, giant slalom and slalom.

2010 Alpine Juniors underway in Mont Blanc

The first competition was the ladies' super G on Sunday in which Marine Gauthier (FRA) beat her teammate Jeromine Geroudet by eight hundredths to win her second title. In the ladies night slalom, Germany's Christina Geiger claimed victory by a huge margin of 1.57 seconds over Norway's Mona Loeseth and Sweden's Sara Hector, both skiers with World Cup experience.

The men's giant slalom was the first men's event in Les Houches on Sunday with a couple of the youngest guys in the field upsetting better established racers. The barely 18-year-old French skier Mathieu Faivre took first, ahead of Stefan Luitz of Germany, himself just 18.

In the men's night slalom, the Swiss Reto Schmidiger unexpectedly clinched his first gold medal despite starting with bib number 32. He was in third position after the first run but both leader Alexis Pinturault of France and runner-up Thomas Koenig of Austria went out in the second run opening the way for Schmidiger to move up from third to claim victory. Austria's Lukas Tippelreither grabbed silver and Russian's Sergei Maitakov bronze.

In the ladies' first downhill training, Jasmin Rothmund from Switzerland posted the fastest time on Tuesday after placing seventh in the super-G on Sunday. There is another training run scheduled for Wednesday.

After five of the eight events, host nation France leads the medals table with three gold medals and one silver. Germany follows in 2nd place with two medals (1-1-0) while Switzerland in 3rd place has earned one gold. The competitions will continue until Saturday, 6th February, with both downhills and the ladies giant slalom.

For more information, make sure to check out the coverage at www.fisalpine.com

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