Mikaela Shiffrin completes super-G; Lara Gut-Behrami wins gold

Feb. 10 (UPI) -- Two-time Olympic gold medalist Mikaela Shiffrin of the United States failed to medal during Friday's super-G race following a disappointing start to the Beijing Games.

The 26-year-old Colorado native entered Beijing as the reigning Olympic women's super-G champion from Pyeongchang in 2018 and was seen as a favorite to medal in her races. With another first-place finish, Shiffrin would have become the first American Alpine skier to win three Olympic golds.

In her first event, the giant slalom, on Monday, Shiffrin was disqualified when she skidded off the course after the first few gates. At Wednesday's women's slalom, she again failed to complete the race and sat on the sidelines of the course with her head down.

On Friday, Shiffrin was looking to turn the page with the super-G, tweeting prior to hitting the slopes that she was grateful for "the opportunity to refocus on a new race, in the sport that I love so much."

"Today is super-G, and super-G is fun," she said.

As the 11th skier on Friday, Shiffrin put down a solid run, less aggressive than her usual tempo with only a slight slip along the way to posting a respectable time of 1 minute 14.30 seconds that put her initially in eighth place.

Though it wasn't enough to medal, the American was all smiles.

"I think today I proved to myself that I can still trust my instincts a bit, and that's really, really huge," she said in an interview with NBC. "And for all the people who've been sending me support I can only say thank you."

The gold was won by Lara Gut-Behrami of Switzerland, making her the first-ever Swiss athlete to win the coveted hardware in the Super-G.

She posted a time of 1 minute 13.51 seconds, which was 0.22 seconds faster than Austrian silver-medal winner Mirjam Puchner's 1 minutes 13.73 seconds.

Gut-Behrami now adds gold to the bronze medal she won days earlier in the women's giant slalom and the one she earned in downhill at the Sochi Games in 2014.

The bronze was won by Swiss skier Michelle Gisin, who posted a time of 1 minute 13.81 seconds.