McGrath's Cathartic Return to Winning After Olympic Heartbreak Sends the Slalom Globe Race to Hafjell

Three weeks ago, Atle Lie McGrath walked alone into a hillside forest in Bormio, ski poles hurled in disgust, the sound of the crowd still audible in the distance, carrying a weight that no Olympic pre-race favourite should ever have to carry. He had been the man most likely to win gold in the slalom at the Milano Cortina Games. He had not finished the run. He had not come back out of those trees for a very long time.

On Sunday, on the sun-baked Podkoren 3 course in Kranjska Gora, he came back out emphatically. McGrath's emotions came full circle when he protected his first-run lead to win a tough, sun-baked World Cup slalom by just 0.01 seconds — the same hundredth of a second that has defined a weekend of almost unrelenting tension in Slovenia. He was greeted at the finish by teammate Henrik Kristoffersen, runner-up by the minimum margin, and childhood friend Lucas Pinheiro Braathen, third by 0.04 seconds, one day after the Brazilian had won the giant slalom.

It was a deeply personal victory in a season already saturated with drama — and it came with a dedication that silenced the finishing enclosure.

McGrath's emotions at the Olympics had been heightened because his grandfather died in the week the Games opened. He dedicated Sunday's victory to him. "To bounce back like this after the Olympics, I think he has something to do with it. He was looking over me today," the Vermont-born Norwegian said. "I love him so much and he has helped me with so many things in life."

"Today is just about luck," McGrath said after winning his first men's slalom since that emotional exit at the Milano Cortina Olympics, when he skied out of the race he had been set to win — and famously hiked across the mountainside to cool off alone beneath the trees lining the course in Bormio. Luck, perhaps. But luck had very little to do with the first run that won him the race.

“I was not calm, I was very stressed and nervous all day,” admitted McGrath afterwards. “I think the added pressure of the Slalom globe was for sure something that was new for me, I haven’t been in a fight in the last couple of races before.

“This was a new experience, and new experiences are tiring. I was very nervous, but to have the hundredth on my side today just felt amazing.”

McGrath knew his exemplary morning should give him enough advantage to stay ahead. “For sure my first run helped me get there,” he said. “The second run was not great, but it was enough, and today that was all I could do. Just fighting. Trying to stay calm and stay clean.”

McGrath, carrying bib 6, laid down the fastest time on the opening run with an aggressive, technically precise performance from top to bottom of the Podkoren 3 slope. He beat Kristoffersen by one hundredth of a second in the end, with Braathen a close third — 0.04 seconds back — a day after the Brazilian won the giant slalom to back up his Olympic title.

The second run was a nerve-shredding exercise in protecting margins. Kristoffersen, as he has done so often over a distinguished career, came hunting hard — clean, committed, and relentless. But the hundredth of a second that McGrath had banked was enough. Just barely. The winner's reaction at the finish line — part relief, part grief, part pure joy — was one of the images of the weekend.

For Braathen, third on Sunday after first on Saturday, the weekend has been nothing short of extraordinary. His 60 points earned Sunday also closed the gap in the overall standings to four-time defending champion Marco Odermatt, though Odermatt's lead remains substantial at 572 points with seven races left.

McGrath extended his lead in the season-long slalom standings over Braathen to 41 points, ahead of a decisive race on the 24th of March at the course where they raced as children in Norway.

"Me and Lucas, we grew up skiing together in Hafjell," McGrath said. "So it has a lot of special memories and it is going to be a pretty cool fight."

Kristoffersen was pleased with another great performance on the Slovenian snow where he tends to perform well. “I’m super happy with the second place, super happy with the podium,” he said. “I made so many mistakes in the second run, and there was so much time in there, but that’s how it is sometimes. This is skiing and it’s small margins.”

“I always like coming here in the spring, even when it was snowing. I really like the hill, it’s a hill where you have to be a good skier – it’s not only to be super risky and ski fast on the flat. You have to ski a proper good turn. I think that’s why I’ve done good here, also that it’s in the spring suits me.

“Slovenia is some country with some great athletes. I’m friends with [cyclist Tadej] Pogacar, and he’s a great guy.”

Pinheiro Braathen was also gracious. “It’s a complicated day in the end isn’t it?” he said. “I had all the opportunity to bring another first place in here, and I felt awesome today. The crowd was amazing, my skis felt great and my technician did an amazing job. It was mine to win today, but the best man stands on top and that is my good friend Atle.”

France's Clément Noël remains mathematically in contention, 77 points behind McGrath. Kristoffersen is 99 adrift and needs an unlikely scenario — a win, and all three men above him failing to score — to take the globe. Realistically, the slalom title comes down to two childhood friends, raised on the same Norwegian slopes, now representing different nations, going head to head for the crystal in the final race of the regular season. The sport could not script it more perfectly.

The most startling result of the afternoon had nothing to do with the podium. Olympic and world champion Loïc Meillard — the man who in Bormio stepped through the gap that McGrath's exit created to claim the Olympic gold — skied out in the first run in Kranjska Gora. The Swiss ace, who arrived in Slovenia among the favourites and who had barely put a gate wrong all season, was simply gone — another casualty of the unforgiving Podkoren 3 surface, baked hard by a bright March sun that was simultaneously spectacular to ski in and merciless on those who lost their edge.

Meillard is no longer in the slalom globe chase as a result. For the reigning Olympic champion to exit the last regular-season slalom before the Finals without a single point, on a course this competitive, is the kind of result that concentrates the mind ahead of Norway.

Stand back and consider what Lucas Pinheiro Braathen has produced in 48 hours in Slovenia. A commanding GS victory on Saturday that slashed Marco Odermatt's discipline lead to single figures. A slalom podium on Sunday that further burnished a season already illuminated by Olympic gold. In the giant slalom, Braathen's win allowed him to close within 48 points of Odermatt for the discipline title, with just the Finals remaining.

Two races. Two podiums. The Brazilian — born in Zürich, raised partly in Hafjell, now racing under the flag of his mother's country — has turned this final stretch of the season into something approaching a personal exhibition. The Hafjell finals are his home mountain, the course he skied as a boy. McGrath's too. The rest of the circuit has been put on notice.

The World Cup Finals in Hafjell, Norway are the next stop for the technical racers. The slalom globe, the GS globe, and the overall crystal are all still alive in ways that few predicted even a month ago. McGrath heads there as slalom leader, Braathen as GS challenger, and both as men shaped by the same Norwegian valley — which will, in the final week of March, host the most consequential race of both their careers.

From the forest in Bormio to the top step of the Podkoren 3 podium in three weeks. Atle Lie McGrath is back. And he is heading home.