Wanaka skeleton
racer Louise Corcoran (29) ended her northern hemisphere
season on a high at the weekend, winning the America's Cup at
Lake Placid in the United States at the weekend.
It is Corcoran's first major series win in eight seasons on
ice and the 2006 Winter Olympian is the first southern
hemisphere athlete to win the overall America's Cup title.
Corcoran is now travelling back to New Zealand with her
trophy and expects to arrive in Christchurch tomorrow.
The last week of racing had been great preparation for the
2009 World Championship to be held on the same track,
Corcoran said on her blogspot on Sunday.
"There are three rather difficult corners/transitions in this
track for me [and] in all four of my race runs I got those
sections of the track clean with no hits or skids, so my aim
of entering the world champs with detailed notes of how to do
those sections is achieved,'' she
said.
Corcoran went into the weekend's competition ranked second,
having earlier won two of the six-race series.
Several nations sent their top World Cup competitors to the
final two races of the America's Cup at Lake Placid to gain
experience for the 2009 championships, providing tougher than
usual competition at the second-tier event.
Corcoran finished 11th of the 26 competitors but still had
enough points from her earlier races to win the trophy
outright.
Corcoran said she could not wait to be home after a
seven-month season overseas, during which she took just one
week off at Christmas to spend with her grandmother in
Liverpool.
"I have really felt the length of the season over these last
two weeks. I have raced in more races than any other
[skeleton racing] athletes, been away from home for longer
than any other athlete and probably had more runs than most,
too. I am ready for a few days off. My aim was to get as many
runs in this year as physically possible and I sure did,''
she said.
Among her other achievements this season was to record a
personal best push time of 5.84sec.
She also recorded her best down time and was thrilled to be
competing without pain after problems with her shoulders last
season.
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