Harrop Wins Courchevel Sprint | Blues’ Performance

French ski mountaineering leader Emily Harrop easily won the Courchevel sprint counting for the ski mountaineering World Cup on Thursday, three weeks before the Milan-Cortina Olympic Games where the discipline will make its debut.

Ski mountaineering, a sport where participants ski both uphill and downhill, will make its Olympic debut next month with three events: women’s sprint, men’s sprint and mixed relay.

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Thursday in the Savoyard resort, for her international return, Emily Harrop showed that she was more than ever the favorite for the Olympic title: undefeated in sprint in the World Cup last winter, she flew through all the rounds (qualifications, quarter-final, semi-final, final) of the sprint on Thursday.

«I left today with the desire to control my race from start to finish, to gain confidence at the start of the season and then obviously to try to thrill the people who came to see us a little.», Reacted the Savoyard skier after the race. “For now, I’m satisfied and things are going in the right direction for the future.»

Harrop, 28, won in front of her teammate Margot Ravinel, while the Italian Giulia Murada completed the podium in the sprint, the shortest and most explosive format in ski mountaineering with rounds that are run in just three minutes for women.

With this second place, which is added to her victory in the first sprint of the season in Solitude (United States) in December, Margot Ravinel takes a big option for Olympic qualification. Emily Harrop is already qualified.

Among the men, the French leader Thibault Anselmet, also already qualified for the Games, took second place in the sprint won by the Spaniard Oriol Cardona Coll. The Russian Nikita Filippov, who races under a neutral banner, took third place.