In Courchevel,
So far, so good.
Very well even for Alexis Pinturault who completed a superb super-G round on the Eclipse - bathed in magnificent sunshine - in Courchevel.
At home, therefore, the Frenchman did not leave anyone else the honor of taking the lead in the combined halfway.
In 1'08''25, the 2019 world champion in the specialty took control ahead of the defending champion, the Austrian Marco Schwarz.
Between the two men, a simple breath of air of six hundredths.
In favor of the French, who will start first for the slalom from 2:30 p.m.
With dreams of grandeur in mind.
“The state of mind was very good, in the sense that I knew that I had to do a good round of super-G and that anything could happen”, he analyzed in the mixed zone, before leaving to get some air. the mind.
“It was a technical track but at the same time the super-G is straight and fast, so you had to take risks and not go too far.
We are three athletes to have achieved this.
There is now the second round to be able to have fun.
The confidence is there even though my last races in slalom were not very good.
But precisely, it takes away a little pressure from me.
Read alsoAlexis Pinturault: “Skiing at home can give me a little extra soul”
But before dreaming of gold, Alexis Pinturault especially had the merit of reassuring himself, he who had been ill a few days ago.
And, above all, he who arrived in Courchevel without any real landmark or confidence.
With only one podium in the World Cup during the current exercise - a 3rd place in super G at Beaver Creek -, the Frenchman was far from his time of passage of the vintage vintage 2020-2021, during which he won the big globe crystal in the general classification.
A masterpiece as well as a personal accomplishment from which, paradoxically, he struggled to recover.
But at home, just a few kilometers from his father's majestic hotel, the Annapurna, Pinturault rebounded from his club at the best time.
Even if his season in super-G foreshadowed interesting prospects for this first round of the combined, it was difficult to imagine him dominating to this point references in the discipline such as the Norwegian Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, relegated to more than a second ( +1''05), or the Austrian Vincent Kriechmayr, who dropped more than half a second to the flying Frenchman (+0''58).
Even the leader of the World Cup, the Swiss Marco Odermatt, had to bow for more than two tenths, before being disqualified.
Nevertheless, nothing has been done yet for the Frenchman as his current difficulties between the slalom poles push him to remain measured.
Recently, both in Kitzbühel and Schladming, Pinturault had failed to qualify for the second round.
And his 16th place in the classification of the discipline in the World Cup says a lot about his torments of the season.
But reinvigorated by the Courchevel sun, the Frenchman gave himself the right to dream big.
