Three races. Three Italian winners. Veteran Curtoni Completes Extraordinary Dolomites Sweep In Va Di Fassa Super G

Three races. Three Italian winners. Three days that will be talked about on the alpine circuit for years.

When Laura Pirovano crossed the finish line on Friday afternoon for the first World Cup win of her career, it felt like a once-in-a-generation moment of local joy. When she did it again on Saturday by the same hundredth of a second margin, it felt like something extraordinary was being written in these Dolomite valleys. And when Elena Curtoni, the 35-year-old veteran from Morbegno, stood atop the super-G podium on Sunday to complete the most complete Italian weekend in modern women's World Cup history, it felt like something that simply should not have been possible — and was.

Curtoni clocked 1 minute 29.07 seconds to take victory on the La Volata course, her first World Cup win since a downhill triumph at St. Moritz in December 2022 and her fourth career win overall. She finished 0.26 seconds clear of Norway's Kajsa Vickhoff Lie, with Italy's Asja Zenere third — an outcome that left the home crowd almost too overwhelmed to process. Three Italians on the podium was not a result anyone had predicted. Three Italian victories in a single weekend felt like a fever dream. This was both.

"I knew I could ski a good race because this is a course that has always suited me," Curtoni said at the finish. "Being up there in front of everyone — it had been a long time since that happened to me. The last few years have been very tough. But today I managed to do exactly what I wanted."

“It’s not always easy, I had a few days when I was not believing so much in myself but I knew I was there still with the fastest,” Curtoni said. “Seeing Laura being at the top was charging me. We work together. As a teammate I wanted to be as fast as she was. It’s been a few years I was not here standing on the podium, I had a tough couple of years but I fought my way back as I always do.

“I knew I was not done… I want to thank myself for not giving up.”

The statistics put the achievement in context. At 35, Curtoni would have become one of the oldest women to win a World Cup super-G by some distance — were it not for the remarkable comeback of 41-year-old Lindsey Vonn, whose extraordinary season has redrawn the boundaries of what is athletically possible. Age, it seems, is rather less of an obstacle than the record books once suggested.

Curtoni's run was near-perfect by any measure, technically clean in every sector and notably quickest of all in the lower section, where the course flattens and separates the committed from the cautious. She attacked where others hesitated, and the timing board rewarded her without ambiguity.

For Lie, it helped banish painful memories of the last time she skied a Super G in Val di Fassa.

“I had my worst crash ever so it feels really good to be able to come back like this,” said Lie, who broke her leg in two places in the Italian resort back in 2021. “I actually forgot about it. It’s my first Super G here (since), that’s true. That’s actually really, really cool.”

The Norwegian, who is somewhat of a spring specialist, has loved watching the Italian crowd go wild for their home snow winners and cannot wait for something similar when the World Cup Finals hit Lillehammer at the end of the month.

If Curtoni's win was emotionally charged, what Asja Zenere produced from bib 33 was simply staggering. The 29-year-old Italian had never placed higher than ninth in her entire World Cup career before Sunday's 50th start. She arrived at the start gate not as a contender but as a participant — one of those later starters whose performance is usually absorbed without comment into the lower reaches of the results sheet.

What followed was anything but anonymous. Zenere attacked the course from the start and held nothing back, threading a clean, aggressive line that progressively revealed itself to be something extraordinary. She pushed Olympic silver medallist Romane Miradoli and New Zealand's Alice Robinson into a tie for fourth — two decorated athletes beaten from bib 33 by a woman on the first podium of her career.

"After Soldeu I hurt my knee, but this morning I woke up feeling good and managed to put together a super race," Zenere said afterwards. "I wasn't expecting to be third. That makes it even more beautiful."

If Sunday belonged to Italy, it was a very different story for Germany's Emma Aicher — and the consequences for the overall standings could hardly be more significant.

Aicher started with bib 15 and was carrying the fastest splits in the race through the upper section, seemingly on course to take the lead, when a sharp undulation launched her off the snow. She recovered brilliantly for a moment, maintaining balance in extraordinary fashion — before her line carried her wide of a gate, and she was out. Her own response afterwards was characteristically direct. "I'm pretty annoyed," she said. "But when I spend too long at the course inspection I just fill my head with nonsense."

The impact on the standings is severe. Shiffrin extended her lead over Aicher in the overall World Cup standings to 125 points with six races remaining,  a gap that, while not insurmountable, is now a serious obstacle. More immediately, Aicher can no longer win the super-G discipline title — a prize that had seemed within her grasp heading into the weekend.

The super-G crystal globe picture, already complicated, became sharper and more alarming for Italy's Sofia Goggia on Sunday. The discipline leader had an opportunity to seal her first career super-G title with a strong result. She never found her rhythm on a course disrupted by bumps and ruts that knocked her repeatedly off her chosen line. "I don't want to use it as an excuse, but all the bumps and impacts completely threw me," she admitted. The result: ninth place, 0.64 seconds back.

Her lead over Alice Robinson in the super-G standings was cut to 63 points, with 100 available for the race winner in Norway. Goggia now travels to Kvitfjell with a lead that offers no comfort whatsoever — Robinson needs only to win the final race and Goggia fails to finish on the podium, and the globe changes hands. It is, as they say in these mountains, entirely open.

The day's most intriguing subplot was provided by Mikaela Shiffrin, who made only her second super-G start in more than two years. The three-time Olympic champion wore bib 31, entering the course half an hour after Aicher had already skied out, in what was clearly a strategic appearance aimed at banking overall points rather than competing for a podium.

She finished 23rd, earning just eight World Cup points— enough, on this particular Sunday, to extend her lead. With Aicher absent from the results and Shiffrin on the scoreboard in any position, the arithmetic does its quiet work. The sixth overall globe inches closer.

Step back from the individual results and appreciate the full picture. In the space of 72 hours on the La Volata course in Val di Fassa, Italian women's ski racing produced two downhill victories by an athlete who had never won before, a super-G victory by a 35-year-old who had been waiting three years for her moment, and a first career podium for a skier wearing bib 33.

Curtoni's win was the 147th World Cup victory in the history of Italian women's alpine skiing. The Dolomites, it turns out, were simply waiting for the right weekend.

Norway awaits: the World Cup Finals in Lillehammer, the downhill globe to be decided, the super-G title fight between Goggia and Robinson, and Shiffrin's march towards a sixth overall crystal. But before all of that, allow this weekend its proper moment. Val di Fassa 2026 — Pirovano, Pirovano, Curtoni, Zenere on the podium — will not be forgotten quickly.