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| - Reigning overall champion Aleksander Aamodt Kilde added Saturday's World Cup downhill to his super-G success at Val Gardena the day before to take the lead in his pursuit of a second straight big crystal globe. He took the honours by 22 hundredths of a second from American Ryan Cochran-Siegle, who celebrated his first ever podium at the 99th attempt. "Yes, definitely, big step for me today," Cochran-Siegle, 28, said. "I have good feelings on my skiing right now, and to be able to do all the way from start to finish, it's huge," he added. It was Norwegian Kilde's sixth win on the World Cup circuit, with half of that haul coming on the same Saslong slope as he also won the downhill there in 2018. "Like yesterday (Friday) it was very close. When you look at the times, you really have to be at yoour best," said Kilde. World Cup super-G champion Beat Feuz was third, at 0.54sec. Kilde heads the overall standings on 335 points from Swiss rival Marco Odermatt (290 pts) and France's Alexis Pinturault (276 pts) who elected to bypass these two races at Val Gardena. Down in 12th in the table sits Cochran-Siegle, whose career best performance came 24 hours after he had finished eighth to claim his first ever top-10 super-G placing. The man from said he hadn't been focusing on a top three finish. "You have to ski clean and fast all the way through. You can't just walk on the podium, you really have to put everything together, I was just focusing on my skiing." A little while earlier, Cochran-Siegle's compatriot Breezy Johnson secured her second third-place finish in 24 hours in the women's World Cup at Val d'Isere as US star Mikaela Shiffrin sat out the two races. With no fans allowed to watch the action due to coronavirus restrictions the Val Gardena organisers placed wooden sculptures of spectators at the foot of the slope. alu/nr/gj
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