Skier Mancuso shines in the spotlight -- again

After falling behind early, Julia Mancuso (above) finished just .05 seconds behind Elisabeth Goergl for the gold in the Super G at the World Alpine Championships.

Alexis Boichard/Agence Zoom/Getty Images

Say this for Julia Mancuso: she is a big-game skier. The alpine ace proved it once again Tuesday morning when she won a silver medal in the Super G at the World Alpine Championships in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. Behind for much of the run, Mancuso made up half a second on the bottom portion of the course and finished just .05 seconds behind Elisabeth Goergl of Austria. Mancuso's teammate, Lindsey Vonn, took seventh in the race.

"I'm definitely psyched with the silver," Mancuso said after the race. "I knew I was slow on top and I had to fight my way back onto the podium. Who knows, if I was a little faster in one part, I would have had it."

This grace -- and guts -- under fire is nothing new for the 26-year-old Mancuso. The medal was her seventh at either a world championship or Olympic Games, even though she has only won four World Cup races in her career. When the spotlight is on and the medal is significant, Mancuso always seems to nail it.

Since winning the downhill on Mar. 7, 2007 in Tarvisio, Italy, Mancuso has not won a World Cup race. Yet she took a pair of impressive silvers in the downhill and combined at the Vancouver Olympics to go with her gold medal in the giant slalom four years earlier. She won that race on a bad hip that would require offseason surgery. She had inconsistent finishes this season, but showed hints of what was to come last month in Cortina, where she finished second in a downhill race and took two fourths in separate Super G events.

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Former Oregon Duck Ashton Eaton bested his own world indoor mark in the heptathlon on Sunday, amassing 6,568 points, 69 points more than he scored at the NCAA championships in Fayetteville, Ark. in March. Eaton, an Olympic decathlon hopeful, recorded marks of 6.66 seconds for 60 meters, 7.77 meters (25 feet 6 inches) for the long jump, 14.45 meters (47 feet 5 inches) for the shot put, 2.01 meters (6 feet 7 inches) for the high jump, 7.60 seconds for the 60-meter hurdles, 5.20 meters (17 feet 0.75 inches) for the pole vault and 2:34.74 for the 1,000-meter run.

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French Olympic alpine legend Jean-Claude Killy has been under fire lately for not aggressively backing the bid of Annecy, France to host the Winter Games in 2018. The city (it is a technically classified as a commune) near Geneva is bidding against Pyeongchang and Berlin, and the IOC will choose the winner on July 6 in Durban, South Africa.

Annecy's bid has been battered by financial and operational difficulties. Edgar Grospiron, the Olympic moguls champion in 1992, became the bid's chief executive, but later resigned, claiming that Annecy didn't have the money to challenge the other bidders. Businessman Charles Beigbeder replaced him, and Beigbeder has been spearheading Annecy's readiness for the IOC's evaluation committee visit this week. Behind the scenes, some suggested Killy, an IOC member, was among those holding out his support for a possible bid by Paris to stage the 2024 Summer Games on the 100th anniversary of the last time the Games appeared there.

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In advance of the world championships in Konigssee, Germany, next weekend, the World Cup bobsled season finished up last week in Cesana, Italy. Manuel Machata of Germany took the top overall spot as driver for the four-man bob, with Steven Holcomb of the U.S. in second. Machata, the two-time world junior champion, had a breakthrough season, outpointing Holcomb's crew, 1597 points to 1522. Russian Alexander Zubkov won the two-man standings, with Machata second and Holcomb fourth. U.S. driver Shauna Rohbock also took fourth, as German veteran Sandra Kiriasis handily took the women's two-man bobsled crown.

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An ankle injury to Dathan Ritzenhein will keep the big four of U.S. male distance running from entering the same event for the first time since the Olympic marathon trials in the fall of 2007. Ritzenhein, who had already announced he would miss the London Marathon in April, officially pulled out of the New York Half-Marathon on Monday. The race that will take place on March 20 will still feature a loaded field, including Olympic silver medalist and New York Marathon champ Meb Keflezighi, defending Olympic trials winner Ryan Hall and Abdi Abdirahman, the 2008 Olympic trials champ at 10,000 meters.

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He's no Olympian, but Belgian runner Stefaan Engels recently completed an Olympian feat of running one marathon each day for an entire year. Engels, 49, a childhood asthmatic, crossed the finish line in Barcelona last weekend for his final race. In all, he ran and completed marathons in seven countries, finishing his fastest in two hours, 56 minutes and averaging roughly four hours per race.

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The domestic rowing world lost a legendary figure last Thursday, when W. Hart Perry passed away at age 78. A rower at Dartmouth in the '50s, Perry became the executive director of the National Rowing Foundation. Perry was the first non-British citizen to be elected a steward of the Royal Henley Regatta. He received U.S. Rowing's medal of honor in 2009.