SOELDEN, Austria (AP) — The U.S. women’s ski team opened the World Cup season on Saturday with its best giant slalom result in more than three decades.
And, for a change, it wasn’t record-holder Mikaela Shiffrin leading the way. Unheralded Katie Hensien placed fourth at the traditional season-opening GS on a glacier in the Austrian Alps, followed by Shiffrin in fifth and Nina O’Brien in seventh. Paula Moltzan rounded off the team’s strong showing in 11th.
Remarkably, Hensien and O’Brien sat out last season with injuries and returned to top-level racing after 19 months with career-best results. “First time back, first time ever racing on this hill, I couldn’t have asked for a better day,” said Hensien, who grew up in Park City and went to college in Denver. “And it’s really good to be able to trust my body again.
My knee feels great and I just trusted my skiing today and went for it.” Hensien first raced on the World Cup circuit in 2017 and achieved just one previous top-20 result, 18th in a slalom in Zagreb, Croatia, four seasons ago. Starting Saturday’s race wearing bib No.
47, Hensien made it all the way up to 17th after the first run, and then posted the fastest time in the final run to climb to fourth, only three-hundredths short of the podium. “It shocked me,” she said. “The emotions hit me really hard because (I'm) coming back from a knee injury and then it’s been a year and a half.
It means a lot. And it just proved that all that hard .