She had been competing the whole season in the World Champion´s yellow shirt, which should have been Sonja Steinacher´s. But the Italian quit her career after winning the title and being runner up, Ekatharina Lavrentjeva (RUS) took the shirt. Now, after a season of ups and downs, problems with her sled and not finding her best shape, she finally proved that the yellow shirt is actually hers. With an excellent second run and good first and third runs, she took gold. “I have been training for this very day, it was my goal, my dream to win here. I had some mistakes in my last run, but I won and the joy about that makes me forget the mistakes,” the Russian said after the race. “Thank you to my trainer, thank you to my team and to the crowd here.”

Silver medallist Barbara Abart (ITA) was more than happy about her best season result: “I have not had a very good season so far, but when we came here to qualify for the World Championships, I instantly liked the track. I had my problems in the training runs, but I am happy that it went so well today. I was not nervous at all, just the other way round, I was afraid I might be too calm”, said the 19-year-old.

A happy end had Renate Gietl´s personal fight with the “Gumpfrei”-Track of Latsch. After a struggle over days, the Italian serial winner finally found peace: “My very last run today was the only good one I had on this track. I just did not know what to do with the conditions here. Now I know how to race here.” Her excellent last run (fastest time of the day) put her on the podium and pushed team-World Champion Melanie Batkowski (AUT) to the fourth rank. “I have had such a good season and it would have been a pity not to win a medal in the World Championships”, said Renate Gietl.

It could have been each one of the five Italians at the top of the ranking after the first run to win the title. But in the end once again it was Toni Blasbichler who claimed the top spot. When he won his first World Champion title back in 2001 in Stein/Enns everybody would have thought that local hero Ferdinand Hirzegger (AUT) would win on his home track when in the end Blasbichler went home with the gold medal and Hirzegger had to settle for silver. History repeated itself when the local hero of Laces, Andreas Castiglioni seemed to race to gold, but after three runs the new World Champion was Toni Blasbichler. “It is so difficult to win at home with all the crowd screaming for you”, said the eventual silver medallist Castiglioni. “I felt so good when I went into my final run, the first curve went well, second fine, third fine, then it happened and I made a mistake. Somehow I never found back into rhythm. But Toni knows very well how hard it is to win at home and maybe he had a little bit less pressure than I had today.”
The fight for the bronze medal was also one within the Italian team. In the end the luckier one was Patrik Pigneter. “Florian and I planned on a tied race”, Pigneter joked after he had beaten his team mate Florian Breitenberger by only three hundredths of a second. Best non-Italian was former five-times World Champion Gerhard Pilz (AUT), who was quite satisfied with his result, after having had problems throughout the season. “We tried a lot with our material and now we have reached a point where we are ready to compete again. It went better from one run to the next.” Only a messed up third run stood in the way of a real sensation: Ziga Pagon from Slovenia had been ranked sixth after two runs, but in the end he fell back on the eighth spot.