Ester Ledecka led the second training session for a World Cup downhill by a comfortable margin Monday \u2014 two days after winning a parallel giant slalom snowboarding event.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy first turns on skis were this morning \u2014 after two weeks \u2014 because I was just snowboarding,\u201d Ledecka told The Associated Press.<\/p>\n
Actually, it has been nine days since Ledecka competed on skis, finishing 29th in a super-G in St. Moritz, Switzerland, on Dec. 8. But considering all that she\u2019s done since then, it\u2019s no wonder that it feels like two weeks.<\/p>\n
Ledecka finished second in a snowboard race in Carezza, Italy, on Thursday and then won a night race in nearby Cortina d\u2019Ampezzo on Saturday \u2014 meaning she was on skis in Val Gardena about 36 hours after her latest boarding victory.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was kind of crazy to come here, because it\u2019s a new hill for everyone,\u201d said Ledecka, who was 14th in the opening training session. \u201cSo I was a little insecure in the morning with my ski turns but I\u2019m happy that I was able to feel good on my skis and have some good runs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ledecka finished 0.40 seconds ahead of Selva native Nicol Delago and 0.43 ahead of Nicole Schmidhofer, the Austrian who won this season\u2019s opening two downhills.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo far so good. But it\u2019s still just a training,\u201d Ledecka said. \u201cAll the girls are practicing and looking for the good lines.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the Pyeongchang Olympics, Ledecka followed her super-G victory in Alpine skiing by winning the parallel GS in snowboarding \u2014 becoming the first athlete to win two golds at the same Winter Games using two different types of equipment.<\/p>\n
In the Olympic super-G, Ledecka beat Anna Veith by 0.01 seconds \u2014 after U.S. broadcaster NBC had already declared Veith the gold medalist and switched its viewers to figure skating.<\/p>\n
While the 23-year-old Czech athlete still lacks experience in skiing, this week\u2019s races in Val Gardena on a slope that the women have not raced on before evens the playing field for her.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an advantage for me,\u201d she acknowledged. \u201cWe\u2019ll see how I can play with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ledecka\u2019s chances are also boosted by the fact that downhill standouts Lindsey Vonn and Sofia Goggia are currently out injured and overall World Cup leader Mikaela Shiffrin is sitting out to rest.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a long way in front of me in skiing still,\u201d Ledecka said. \u201cI hope I\u2019ll improve myself a little bit this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ledecka\u2019s Olympic success has made her one of the most popular athletes in the Czech Republic \u2014 rivaling even the country\u2019s hockey stars. Barbie recently introduced a Ledecka doll in its \u201cRole Models\u201d series \u2014 replete with miniature equipment for both snowboarding and skiing .<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Barbie doll was a nice surprise and I hope they will make some more, because I (got) a lot of messages from my fans that they want to buy it,\u201d Ledecka said. \u201cOn one side (the increased attention) is good, on the other side you kind of a little bit lost the privacy but I learned to work with it and I\u2019m OK.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ledecka broke a bone in her left hand during snowboard training at Copper Mountain in Colorado last month and was left with a big scar on the top of her hand from surgery.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was snowboarding and I put my hand on the ground and I hit the gate. I had to stop for one week,\u201d Ledecka said. \u201cThe good thing for me was that when I came back I was snowboarding, so I didn\u2019t have to hold the pole.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ledecka plans to keep switching back and forth between skiing and snowboarding this season but she could run into a dilemma with the parallel GS at the world snowboard championships scheduled for Utah on Feb. 4 \u2014 the same day that the Alpine skiing worlds open in Are, Sweden.<\/p>\n
Ledecka is the defending world champion in snowboarding.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast year we were lucky, with the weather and everything so the whole plan fit,\u201d said Tomas Bank, Ledecka\u2019s coach. \u201cThis year I recognize it is not that easy.\u201d<\/p>\n
AP Sports Writer Graham Dunbar in St. Moritz, Switzerland, contributed to this report.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ledecka led the second training session for a World Cup downhill by a comfortable margin Monday \u2014 two days after winning a parallel giant slalom snowboarding event. \u201cMy first turns on skis were this morning \u2014 after two weeks \u2014 because I was just snowboarding,\u201d Ledecka told The Associated Press. Actually, it has been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":96648,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5770],"tags":[378,1660,2343],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-96647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-high-school-sports","tag-alpine-skiing","tag-snowboarding","tag-sports-group"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96647"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=96647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}