Team USA narrowly misses bronze in Alpine skiing; Austria wins gold

Feb. 19 (UPI) -- The U.S. parallel Alpine skiing mixed team lost its matchup for the bronze medal against Norway in the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games on Sunday, taking fourth place. Austria beat Germany to win the gold.

The event originally had been scheduled for Saturday, but brutal cold and wind at the course site on Xiaohaituo Mountain forced Olympic organizers to postpone it by a day.

Alpine skiing sees two skiers go head-to-head on parallel, downhill courses, weaving through identical obstacles in a speed race. Each mixed-gender team has four skiers.

In case of a tie, the winning team is determined by adding the times of the fastest male and female skiers. The teams in both final matchups tied Sunday.

Team USA's first skier, Paula Moltzan, put the Americans ahead, but Tommy Ford and Mikaela Shiffrin lost their respective matchups. The fourth and final skier River Radamus tied the scores, but the United States lost the tie-breaking time sum by 0.42 seconds.

Germany and Austria also tied, but Austria's Stefan Brennsteiner and Katharina Liensberger competed their runs with a faster combined time than Germany's Lena Duerr and Alexander Schmid.

The event marked the sixth and final chance for U.S. star skier Shiffrin, who'd hoped to make a comeback after a series of disappointing individual performances that included failures to complete three runs, a ninth place finish and an 18th place finish.

"My teammates are what carried me through this Olympics," Shiffrin told NBC after the race.

"I don't think you can emphasize it enough, how unbelievable it is for us to be here and be in the hunt for a medal. I get that people will say we came up short," she said. "But to have this depth on our team coming from the U.S., competing in a European-dominated sport ... it's just been incredible to compete today."

Shiffrin had arrived in Beijing with two gold medals and a silver medal already under her belt. Had her Olympics gone differently, she was poised to become the most decorated American Olympian alpine skier in history.

This year marks only the second time mixed parallel Alpine skiing was featured in the Olympics. It was first introduced in Pyeongchang in 2018, when Austria took the silver.