Minnesota skier Paula Moltzan races to her first World Cup podium finish

LECH-ZUERS, Austria – Paula Moltzan, the latest U.S. skier who grew up on Buck Hill, made her way to a World Cup podium for the first time Thursday.

Moltzan, who is from Lakeville and raced in college at Vermont, finished second to Petra Vlhova in a floodlit parallel event. The podium finish came less than six weeks after her first top-10 finish, at the season-opening giant slalom in Austria.

It also came by surprise.

"I was just hoping for a top-30 today," Moltzan said.

Her American teammate Mikaela Shiffrin, who returned from a 10-month break from racing with second- and fifth-place finishes in Finland last weekend, skipped the event. The three-time overall champion preferred to train for upcoming super-G races and giant slaloms. Limited in her options by the pandemic and a back injury, Shiffrin had only trained at slalom recently.

In the absence of Shiffrin, who has 66 World Cup wins, Moltzan came close to her first.

Thursday's event had a knockout format in which two competitors race side-by-side on identical, shortened giant slalom courses, with run times just over 23 seconds.

To keep the event within a TV-friendly time frame, only 16 starters were allowed.

After qualifying in fifth, Moltzan beat the likes of Marta Bassino, who won the season opener last month, by 0.08 seconds in the quarterfinals and former overall champion Lara Gut-Behrami by 0.28 seconds in the semifinals.

Coming off two straight slalom wins in Finland last weekend, Vlhova won the first run of the final against Moltzan by 0.21 seconds. Moltzan seemed to have made up the deficit in the deciding run on the faster blue course but she crashed four gates short of the finish, leaving Vlhova with her third World Cup title in six days.

"Every run was like a final. The girls are really fast. But I am here and I won. It's something amazing for me," Vlhova said.

Some of the favorites, including Wendy Holdener, Alice Robinson, Sofia Goggia and Tessa Worley, were eliminated in qualification runs, necessary to reduce the field of 68.