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McIvor second in ski cross opener

Whistler’s Murray makes finals on second day but men have tough start

Whistler's Ashleigh McIvor and the Canadian ski cross team launched their World Cup season on Saturday in Innichen, Italy, with McIvor leading the team on the first day with a podium appearance.

McIvor placed second in the opening race, ahead of the usually dominating Ophelie David of France, but behind Anna Holmlund of Sweden.

Also for Canada, Kelsey Serwa was 12 th , Danielle Poleschuk 16 th and Julia Murray 18 th .

The Canadian men had a rougher day. Whistler's Davey Barr was the top racer, in 21 st place. Nick Zoricic was 22 nd and Stanley Hayer 24 th .

McIvor, the reigning World Champion, entered the race with a sprained lower back from training earlier in the season. As a result, she opted to miss her training runs on race day so she wouldn't irritate the joint on a course that had no berms on the corners and featured jumps with flat landings and no transitions.

"They seem to have forgotten the landings to go with the jumps, so no matter what you did on each run there were several hard landings," she said. "Our bodies took quite a beating over the last few days."

McIvor said she has made peace with her injury and accepted the fact that she will likely be sore for the duration of the season.

"It's not going to slow me down or keep me off the hill, but it probably will be a bit of a nagging injury through the season," she said. "Ski cross is all about injury management. You're going to crash, it's a given, so it's all how you deal with it... it's all about who has the best physiotherapist!"

Overall the normally dominating Canadian team considered the World Cup opener to be a wakeup call, especially on the men's side.

"The men got beat today and they know that," said head coach Eric Archer. "But the first race of the season is always like that, training/racing against your teammates and racing against other nations are two completely different things and we just need to get this one behind us to set the bar of expectation. I suspect we will see a very different outcome tomorrow."

On Tuesday, the team was back in action on the same course. Whistler's Julia Murray bounced back from a frustrating first day to make the finals and finish fourth. McIvor missed a pole plant in her semi-final race and was relegated to the small final race, that she won. She wound up fifth.

The course was described as an alpine racers' course with smaller features, off-camber turns and aggressive turns. Starts were extremely important as there were few passing opportunities beyond the start gate.

Given the nature of the course and the huge field of international racers with alpine backgrounds looking to qualify for ski cross's debut in the Olympics, Murray was happy with her results on the second day of racing.

"It was a lot different from yesterday, for sure," she said. "My starts were pretty good today, I nailed every start except for the last one... which helped me out a lot. I think on my first day Danny (Danielle Poleschuk) and I were in a heat together and got tangled up a bit between the second and third turn... I gave some room and ended up crashing and that was it for me. I knew I could do better today."

In the last race she made a decision to start on the edge to avoid getting pinched out by Ophelie David. "I was going to take the outside lane and pinch along with her, and I got lost in the features... by the end of the features I was 10 feet out from the left side of the course which was faster and had to catch up to them but I couldn't make it back."

Murray took confidence from the fact that she was still faster than many of the alpine skiers in the field, including racers with World Cup experience that made the leap this season to qualify for the Games.

"I always put people above me, when I shouldn't," Murray said. "That's kind of my mentality, so in my qualifying run when I came in fourth I tried to take as much confidence out of that as possible... it gave me confidence beating the alpine girls for sure."

Murray is off to a great start compared to last year, where she didn't qualify for the finals in the first three races. She has now qualified in both races and is on track to qualify to compete in the 2010 Games.

McIvor took the second day in stride. She knows she could have made the finals except for a mistake on one feature. "I had really good starts today for the most part," she said.

Danielle Poleschuk placed 12 th and Kelsey Serwa 19 th .

The men's team improved over their first day but only a few athletes made it to the quarterfinals. Stanley Hayer finished his day in 11 th place. David Duncan moved up to 14 th and Nick Zoricic was 20 th .

Michael Schmid of Switzerland took the win with teammates Conradign Netzer and Richard Spalinger third and fourth. Audun Groenvold of Norway was second.

Anna Holmlund of Sweden also won the second women's race, followed by Ophelie David and Sanna Luedi of Switzerland.