By USSA

ST. MORITZ, Switzerland – Canada’s Erik Guay became the oldest World Champion in alpine skiing history, winning the men’s super G Wednesday at the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships. Travis Ganong (Squaw Valley) was the top American in 14th.

For Guay – the 35-year-old veteran of the Canadian Ski Team and one of only three athletes competing at these World Championships who also competed in the 2003 World Championships in St. Moritz – this victory was made even more special by sharing the podium with his teammate Manuel Osborne-Paradis, who finished third. Norway’s Kjetil Jansrud was second. Wednesday’s race was the first time that two Canadian men have finished on the podium in World Championship history.

Guay, who started bib 14, Jansrud with bib 9 and Osborne-Paradis bib 26 enjoyed a slight advantage of watching earlier racers tackle the fast, technical and challenging course.

“When you go early like that, you don’t really know how the course is going to run. You don’t get the course reports,” said Ganong, who started bib 4. “It was an open, fast set. The jumps were actually bigger than the downhill training yesterday. It was a really tricky set, really fast speeds, and it’s a World Championship event, so everybody is pushing super hard.”

Starting early, though, Ganong did provide crucial course information for his teammates, including Ryan Cochran-Siegle (Starksboro, Vt.), who finished 28th, and Tommy Biesemeyer (Keene, N.Y.), who posted top-five times at the first three intermediate splits before leaning in and booting out on a tough left-footer, and not finishing.

Wednesday’s race came at the one-year mark away from the first day of the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea.