Last year, she missed her World Championship run with a crash in Pietermaritzburg. Now Manon Carpenter has won the World Cup opener at the same venue, claiming her first ever World Cup victory. World champion Rachel Atherton has to start with a minimum of training runs due to illness. However, she still shows her class and takes second place - on an exhausting downhill course. Third place went to former 4x world champion Jill Kintner (USA).

The only Swiss athlete at the start, Emilie Siegenthaler, crashed heavily in the qualification run. However, she still finished in twelfth place. She fared only slightly better in the race. Siegenthaler rides to ninth place without crashing but not without mistakes. "I just didn't manage to complete a run this week without making any big mistakes. After my crash in qualifying, I didn't have the confidence and in the race run I also had a cross-stall. I was just too tense. Unfortunately, I've never really ridden well here, I know it's not my track. I know that I'm in much better shape this year than I was in 2013 and I worked very hard on it in the winter. But I wasn't able to show that here," explained the disappointed Siegenthaler.

Junior victory for Shaw
American Luca Shaw wins the junior class. He relegates the two Frenchmen Loris Vergier and Amaury Pierron to second and third place. Mike Schär is the only Swiss rider in the junior race. Due to defects, the young man from Zurich is unable to complete a race-like run. Schär comes through in the race run and finishes 14th

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