Carlo Janka

Carlo Janka
	;
Medal record
Men's alpine skiing
Representing Switzerland
Olympic Games
World Championships

Carlo Janka (born October 15, 1986) is a Swiss alpine ski racer from Obersaxen, in the canton of Graubünden. He is considered a rising star of the Swiss team and has won gold medals at both the Winter Olympics and the World Ski Championships, as well as one World Cup discipline title.

Skiing career

Janka competed in his first international FIS race in December 2001. Not until four years later did he reach the podium, but success came in all four disciplines. Janka began racing on the Europa Cup circuit in January 2004. He earned his first two World Cup starts in December of 2005, but did not finish either race. At the 2006 Junior World Championships in Mont Sainte-Anne, Quebec, Canada, he won the bronze medal in giant slalom, and he finished the 2006/07 season in fourth place in the overall Europa Cup standings.

Janka scored his first World Cup points in the giant slalom at Alta Badia on December 17, 2006, finishing in 20th place. But his World Cup breakthrough began two years later, on November 29, 2008, when he came out of the 65th starting position to finish a surprising second place in the downhill at Lake Louise. Two weeks later, on December 13, he skied to his first World Cup victory in a giant slalom race at Val d’Isère, followed the next month by a victory in the Lauberhorn super-combined in Wengen. Later in the season, he won the gold medal in giant slalom and the bronze in downhill at the 2009 World Championships in Val d'Isère.

On the Beaver Creek race weekend of December 4-6, 2009, Janka achieved a remarkable feat by winning the super-combined, the downhill, and the giant slalom on the Birds of Prey course. Janka was the first skier to win three World Cup races in a single weekend since Hermann Maier at the same location ten years earlier on the 1999/2000 World Cup tour. On the same weekend as Janka triumphed in Beaver Creek, Lindsey Vonn almost duplicated the feat on the women's tour at Lake Louise, winning two races and narrowly missing a third win. On January 16, 2010, Janka won the Lauberhorn downhill in Wengen, the longest and fastest race on the World Cup tour, just one day after almost repeating his 2009 win in the super-combined by narrowly placing second behind Bode Miller.

On February 23, 2010, Janka won the gold medal in the giant slalom at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics at Whistler Creekside in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada.

World Cup victories

Season titles

Season	Discipline
2009	Combined
2010	Overall

Race victories

8 race victories (3 downhill, 3 giant slalom, 2 combined)

Date	Location	Race
13 December 2008	Val d'Isère	Giant slalom
16 January 2009	Wengen (Lauberhorn)	Super Combined
4 December 2009	Beaver Creek	Super Combined
5 December 2009	Beaver Creek	Downhill
6 December 2009	Beaver Creek	Giant Slalom
16 January 2010	Wengen (Lauberhorn)	Downhill
10 March 2010	Garmisch Partenkirchen	Downhill
12 March 2010	Garmisch Partenkirchen	Giant Slalom

External links