Breezy Johnson puts U.S. in Olympic team combined lead; Mikaela Shiffrin still to come

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — The pressure is on Mikaela Shriffrin after her American teammate Breezy Johnson put up another lights-out run down the Olympia delle Tofane in the women’s Alpine skiing team combined event Tuesday morning.

In combined, one teammate skis a run of downhill and the other skis slalom, and the times are added together to produce the team’s result.

Johnson, the gold medalist in Sunday’s downhill and Shiffrin’s teammate in the team combined, performed a near carbon copy of her gold-medal run.

On Sunday, Johnson skied sixth and put down a lightning-fast run with just one early slip as she blazed through the rest of the jumps, twists and glides into the finish, where she pumped her poles knowing she’d likely locked up a medal, and very likely a gold.

On Tuesday, under cloudy skies and fast racing conditions in the Dolomites, Johnson skied 14th and recovered from an early slip near the top of the track, but steadied her skis through the rest of the tricky jumps and steeps in the first half of the run. Then, one of the best gliders in the world did her thing — gliding down to the finish and getting her skis back on the snow in a hurry on the final two jumps, to finish in 1:36.59, about a half-second behind her pace Sunday but good enough for the top spot.

Now it’s up to Shiffrin to solve the Olympic hex that fell over her in Beijing, where she crashed three times in six races and left the Games with no medals for the first time in her career after winning gold in both Sochi in 2014 and Pyeongchang in 2018.

She is the greatest technical skier in history and has won nearly every slalom race she has entered this season. She will enter the race that begins at 2 p.m. local time, with a cushion of .06 hundredths of a second.

Jackie Wiles, who finished fourth in the downhill Sunday was fourth near the conclusion of the downhill competiton. Isabella Wright missed a gate, eliminating her and Nina O’Brien.