Norway's Kjetil Jansrud made up for a disappointing super-G by edging out Italian Dominik Paris to seal victory in Saturday's severely shortened Kitzbuehel downhill, the "Super Bowl" of alpine skiing.
Jansrud topped both training runs for the most prestigious race on the World Cup calendar, but flopped in Friday's super-G won by Paris, managing only seventh.
But starting with bib No.18 in the downhill, the Norwegian laid down a perfect line on the Streif piste on Kitzbuehel's fabled Hahnenkamm (rooster's comb) mountain regarded as the toughest on the circuit.
Jansrud clocked 58.16 seconds, two-hundredths ahead of Paris with France's Guillermo Fayed (+0.21) completing the podium, the trio putting down firm markers for next month's World Ski Championships in Colorado.
Last year's winner Hannes Reichelt of Austria could only finish 34th at 1.23sec after making a mistake on the final big bend that both Jansrud and Paris mastered, each going high to further accelerate up to 130km/h into the finish area.
Unfortunately for the racers and tens of thousands of fans, the race was first delayed because of bad visibility and organisers then took the decision to disappointingly move the start down to Seidlalm jump, halfway down the piste.
That meant it went from a 3.3km rollercoaster where racers are propelled to up to 100km/h within 8.5 seconds of kicking out of the normal start gate to a 1.6km 'sprint'.
It also saw some of the most iconic parts of the course bypassed, such as the terrifying opening Mausefalle (mousetrap) jump and compression, the Karusell (carousel) S-turns, the steep Steilhang slope into the technically demanding Brueckenschuss and Gschoess gliding flats and the Alte Schneise (old corridor).
Snow fell throughout the race, with flat light compounding the course's difficulty, but Jansrud revelled in the unparallelled fiesta that glorifies fast alpine skiing, his only moment of doubt coming when Paris crossed the line a hair's breadth away.
Jansrud has become the standard bearer of the Norwegian team in the absence through injury of colossus Aksel Lund Svindal, but the latter was quickly on hand to congratulate his compatriot after he had won the 75th running of the event, which made its debut in 1931.
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