Versatile Ledecka wins parallel giant slalom at snowboard world championships

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Versatile Ledecka wins parallel giant slalom at snowboard world championships

2025-03-20 22:36 Last Updated At：22:51

ST. MORITZ, Switzerland (AP) — Ester Ledecka added another trophy to her collection of silverware when she won the parallel giant slalom at the snowboard world championships on Thursday.

The three-time Olympic champion, who won bronze in the downhill at the Alpine skiing worlds in February, was in a class of her own and dominated qualification then easily defeated all of her rivals en route to the final. There, she beat the defending women’s parallel giant slalom champion Miki Tsubaki of Japan.

It was Ledecka's first snowboard world title in eight years.

The versatile Czech athlete already had two golds and a silver from parallel giant slalom races at the snowboarding worlds in 2015 and 2017.

“It’s awesome,” Ledecka said. “I haven’t competed in a world championships since (2017) because it was difficult with timing because of skiing events.”

Aleksandra Krol-Walas of Poland won the bronze medal race over Ladina Caviezel of Switzerland.

Ledecka famously won Olympic gold in skiing’s super-G and snowboarding’s parallel GS at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, and added another gold on her board in 2022 in Beijing.

A scheduling issue at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics — where the parallel GS in snowboarding and the Alpine downhill are both set for Feb. 8 at venues hours apart — might deny her a chance to replicate that achievement from 2018.

Roland Fischnaller of Italy, who is 44, won the men's title by defeating Stefan Baumeister of Germany in the final. Lee Sang-ho won the bronze medal.

AP sports: https://apnews.com/sports

Heathrow reopens and chaos eases. But critics say the airport's shutdown exposes UK vulnerability

2025-03-22 21:18 Last Updated At：21:21

LONDON (AP) — London Heathrow Airport said it was “fully operational” on Saturday, after an almost daylong closure sparked by an electrical substation fire. But thousands of passengers remained stuck, and airlines warned that severe disruption will last for days as they scramble to relocate planes and crews and get travelers to their destinations.

Friday's travel mayhem raised concerns about Britain's ability to withstand disasters or attacks on critical infrastructure. Inconvenienced passengers, angry airlines and concerned politicians all want answers about how one seemingly accidental fire could shut down Europe’s busiest air hub.

“This is a huge embarrassment for Heathrow airport. It’s a huge embarrassment for the country that a fire in one electricity substation can have such a devastating effect," said Toby Harris, a Labour Party politician who heads the National Preparedness Commission, a group that campaigns to improve resilience.

Heathrow said it had “hundreds of additional colleagues on hand in our terminals and we have added flights to today’s schedule to facilitate an extra 10,000 passengers." It advised passengers to check with their airline before going to the airport.

British Airways, Heathrow’s biggest airline, said it expected to operate about 85% of its 600 scheduled flights at the airport on Saturday. It said that "to recover an operation of our size after such a significant incident is extremely complex.”

While many passengers managed to resume stalled journeys, others remained in limbo.

Laura Fritschie from Kansas City was on vacation with her family in Ireland when she learned that her father had died. On Saturday she was stranded at Heathrow after her BA flight to Chicago was canceled at the last minute.

“I’m very frustrated," she said. “This was my first big vacation with my kids since my husband died, and ... now this. So I just want to go home.”

More than 1,300 flights were canceled and some 200,000 people stranded Friday after an overnight fire at a substation 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) away from the airport cut power to Heathrow, and to more than 60,000 properties.

Residents in west London described hearing a large explosion and then seeing a fireball and clouds of smoke when the blaze ripped through the substation. The fire was brought under control after seven hours, but the airport was shut for almost 18. A handful of flights took off and landed late Friday.

Police said they do not consider the fire suspicious, and the London Fire Brigade said its investigation would focus on the electrical distribution equipment at the substation.

Still, the huge impact of the fire left authorities facing questions about Britain’s creaking infrastructure. The government acknowledged that authorities had questions to answer and said a rigorous investigation was needed to make sure “this scale of disruption does not happen again.”

Harris, from the preparedness commission, said the airport shutdown points to a broader problem with Britain’s economy and infrastructure.

“The last 40, 50 years we’ve tried to make services more efficient,” he said. “We’ve stripped out redundancy, we’ve simplified processes. We’ve moved towards a sort of ‘just in time’ economy.

“There is an element where you have to make sure you’re available for ‘just in case.’ You have to plan for things going wrong.”

Heathrow chief executive Thomas Woldbye said he was “proud” of the way airport and airline staff had responded.

"Remember, the situation was not created at Heathrow Airport," he told the BBC. “The airport didn’t shut for days. We shut for hours."

He said Heathrow's backup power supply, designed for emergencies, worked as expected, but it wasn’t enough to run the whole airport, which uses as much energy as a small city.

“That’s how most airports operate," said Woldbye, who insisted “the same would happen in other airports" faced with a similar blaze.

Heathrow is one of the world’s busiest airports for international travel, and saw 83.9 million passengers last year.

Friday’s disruption was one of the most serious since the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which shut Europe’s airspace for days.

Passengers on about 120 flights were in the air when Friday's closure was announced and found themselves landing in different cities, and even different countries.

Mark Doherty and his wife were halfway across the Atlantic when the inflight map showed their flight from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport to Heathrow was turning around.

“I was like, you’re joking,” Doherty said before the pilot told passengers they were heading back to New York.

Doherty called the situation “typical England — got no back-up plan for something happens like this. There’s no contingency plan.”

Associated Press journalist Kwiyeon Ha at Heathrow Airport contributed to this report.