It’s a Close Call for Downhill U.S. Spots

Three Americans on Friday raced for one of two precious slots left for Sunday’s Olympic downhill, and it was almost eerie how it turned out.

They didn’t end up 1-2-3 but did finish 11th, 12th and 13th.

Steve Nyman won the first automatic bid with his time of 1 minute 50.88 seconds.

He was 1.13 seconds behind trial-run winner Klaus Kroell of Austria.

Right behind Nyman was teammate Marco Sullivan.

And right on Sullivan’s tailwind, in the 13th spot, was American Scott Macartney.

Nyman edged Sullivan by a margin of .24 of a second, and Sullivan finished only .03 ahead of Macartney.

“It shows you how close we are,” Sullivan said.

Macartney and Sullivan will use today’s final downhill training run to determine the final Olympic spot for the United States.

“It’s more a race than a training day,” Macartney said of the situation.

Sullivan agreed, saying, “It’s definitely a little more nerve-racking.... It’s going to be good, whoever gets the spot, it’s going to be exciting.”

Nyman can rest now, knowing he will be racing in the Olympic downhill on Sunday, his 24th birthday.

He plans to use the final training run to work out last-minute kinks.

“I can be much faster,” Nyman said. “Every mistake I really felt, and it kind of bugged me. But I guess everybody made mistakes all the way down.”

A two-time United States downhill champion, Nyman started this year on the “C” team as he tried to fight his way back from a series of injuries.

In the month before the Turin Games, though, Nyman started posting positive results -- notably a fourth-place finish in a World Cup downhill at Garmisch in Germany -- that now give U.S. ski team coaches hope they might have a star on the rise.

Daron Rahlves and Bode Miller had already locked up the top two American downhill slots.

Rahlves was conspicuously missing from Friday’s training run. He decided to take the day off after blowing away the field in Thursday’s first training run. He is expected to participate in today’s final tuneup.

Miller moved from 16th Thursday to a seventh-place finish Friday. The defending World Cup overall champion posted a time of 1:50.72, almost a second behind the winning time.