From Altenberg, GER
(January 27, 2024) – Selina Egle and Lara Kipp secured their first FIL World Championship title in Altenberg on Saturday morning in a race where so many other teams had trouble keeping their sleds pointing downhill.
After one run the Austrian duo trailed Latvia’s Anda Upite and Zane Kaluma by just .03, with the rest of the field seemingly battling for bronze.
In the second run Egle and Kipp were flawless until the end of their run, where they crashed after the finish line but got up with a big fist pump to show that they were both okay and super excited about what they knew was a medal winning run.
Upite and Kaluma were the final team off the top. Their second effort looked to mirror their first, both with a similar start time and an otherwise clean run. But the speed wasn’t quite there for the Latvians, and they couldn’t match their track record first run, falling behind the Austrians by .05 and into second place.
Egle and Kipp’s gold medal was their first world championship title.
For Upite and Kaluma, the duo had been paired together only three-plus weeks prior and have been on fire ever since. Their silver medal was their second in two days, after a silver in the Sprint World Championship race a day prior.
Behind the race for gold, there was a bunch of teams battling out for bronze. The United States’ Chevonne Forgan and Sophie Kirkby had the quickest start of the second heat and the quickest downtime of that heat to take the lead from the sixth place position. Their run was good enough to hold off sprint world champions Andrea Vötter and Marion Oberhofer of Italy to win the United States’ first medal of the weekend, a bronze.
After the race, Forgan told FIL’s Kate Hansen that her and Kirkby’s run was iffy early.
“Our start curve on the first run was pretty rough,” Forgan said. “But the second run was really nice and we were just kind of flowing!”
Vötter and Oberhofer took fourth, while the United States’ Maya Chan and Reannyn Weiler finished fifth.
Outside of the top five, many of the teams had trouble out of Curve 9 and into the Kreisel, including all three German teams. Dajana Eitberger and Saskia Schirmer were the top German team in sixth, the teams of Elise-Marie Storch and Pauline Platz and World Cup leaders Jessica Degenhardt and Cheynne Rosenthal out of the top ten in 12th and 13th.
Results:
| Pos | Names | Nation | Bib | Start 1 | Start 2 | Run 1 | Run 2 | Total |
| 1 | Egle / Kipp | AUT | 14 | 5.975 | 5.981 | 42.364 | 42.397 | 1:24.761 |
| 2 | Upite / Kaluma | LAT | 7 | 5.945 | 5.959 | 42.334 | 42.477 | 1:24.811 |
| 3 | Forgan / Kirkby | USA | 13 | 5.938 | 5.925 | 42.563 | 42.334 | 1:24.897 |
| 4 | Vötter / Oberhofer | ITA | 10 | 5.925 | 5.940 | 42.480 | 42.502 | 1:24.982 |
| 5 | Chan / Weiler | USA | 15 | 5.994 | 5.961 | 42.529 | 42.629 | 1:25.158 |
| 6 | Eitberger / Schirmer | GER | 12 | 5.993 | 5.962 | 42.506 | 43.098 | 1:25.604 |
| 7 | Stramaturaru / Manolescu | ROU | 8 | 6.034 | 6.039 | 43.125 | 42.950 | 1:26.075 |
| 8 | Cezikova / Jansova | CZE | 2 | 6.026 | 6.047 | 43.095 | 43.127 | 1:26.222 |
| 9 | Gulijienaiti / Zhao | CHN | 16 | 6.013 | 6.017 | 43.037 | 43.213 | 1:26.250 |
| 10 | Ziedina / Zvilna | LAT | 4 | 5.989 | 6.006 | 42.887 | 44.035 | 1:26.922 |
| 11 | Domowicz / Piwkowska | POL | 6 | 6.112 | 6.133 | 43.916 | 43.626 | 1:27.542 |
| 12 | Storch / Patz | GER | 1 | 6.045 | 6.018 | 42.987 | 45.303 | 1:28.290 |
| 13 | Degenhardt / Rosehthal | GER | 11 | 5.945 | 5.930 | 42.581 | 46.259 | 1:28.840 |
| 14 | Khytrenko / Koval | UKR | 3 | 6.028 | 6.017 | 43.774 | 46.344 | 1:30.118 |
| 15 | Stetskiv / Mokh | UKR | 9 | 6.037 | 6.040 | 44.097 | 50.919 | 1:35.016 |
| DNF | Robezniece / Bogdanova | LAT | 5 | 5.984 | DNF |