Maria Riesch was the chief beneficiary of a Lindsey Vonn mistake as the German took gold in the women's super-combined at the 2010 Winter Olympics.High on confidence after topping the podium in the downhill, American Vonn looked on course to for a second victory out of a possible five in Vancouver.
She topped the timesheets after the downhill leg of the combined event, but skied over a gate in the slalom discipline, which caused her binding to pop off.
Riesch, who was 0.33 seconds behind at Whistler after the downhill, made no such mistake and posted the fastest time ahead of Julia Mancuso and Anja Paerson.
She finished with an overall time of 2:10.08 to complete almost a second ahead of Mancuso, who collected her second silver in Canada.
Riesch said: "I knew it was a course to attack, the setting was not so difficult. It was attack and nothing else. No one else was having problems so it was full gas and it worked."
The 25-year-old also claimed gold in the slalom event at the World Championships in Val D'Isere last year.
Written by Chris Smith