A thrilling final between the sisters Renate and Christa Gietl was the highlight of the opening day of the RED BULL World Cup. Renate Gietl, ranked second after the first run, had an excellent second run and challenged her sister. Christa heard Renate´s time over the speaker and lost nerves and the race. “I took all the curves a little harder than I did in the first run and so it summed up to this bad result.” In fact she finished eighth in the second run and fell back at the fifth overall rank. “I am sad about my failure but I am also happy for my sister”, she said after the race. Renate Gietl had joy and relief written in her face: “I am so happy”, she said, “my training results were really bad, I had to go through the internal qualification. But now it seems like I did a perfect run.”
Ranked second was Austria´s Sandra Mariner, who has found her old qualities on new material. “I had a lot of troubles with my material last season, so I changed once again. So far the only training facility was here in Longiarù, so it is still to see how the new sled runs on different tracks. But here I am really satisfied.”
Someone else was racing on new material: Russia´s Ekatherina Lavrentjeva. Some might have been surprised that her best training result was a fifth rank, but she gave the explanation herself: “I have a new sled and I have been testing a bit, so I had only one training run on the sled with its new settings. I still make mistakes and it will take me a little to get all settings right.”

Everything right did the Russians Pawel Porschnev/Ivan Lazarev. They did not change anything at their material, but trusted the winning sled of last season. With fastest times in both runs they let no doubt that once again they will be the ones to beat. “We have been here in middle Europe for two weeks already and have worked really hard with our trainer”, they said.
“It is obvious that the Russians have done a lot of training”, said Reinhard Beer (AUT), who together with Herbert Kögl finished second. “At the beginning of the winter most nations still have some problems with the material, so do we. But we are satisfied with the second place.” Not satisfied were the cousins Wolfgang and Andreas Schopf (AUT), who took the third place: “At least the second place would have been possible. We had some minor mistakes, nothing big, but in the end it sums up.”