On 2 February 1999, Hermann Maier stood at the top of the World Championship super-G podium in Beaver Creek — and he was not alone. His time and that of Norway's Lasse Kjus were identical, down to the thousandth of a second. It was the first gold-medal tie in the history of the Alpine World Ski Championships.
Two skiers, one time: a dead-heat down to the thousandth
The race was run on the Birds of Prey course, on the first day of the men's competition. Both men crossed the line in 1:14.53, a result no timing system could separate.
Austria's Hans Knauss took bronze, just one-hundredth of a second off the pace. A gold-medal tie had never happened at a Worlds before, not even in the years when the Olympic Alpine events also counted as the championships.
The middle of a Beaver Creek reign
The tie was the second of what would become seven straight wins for Maier at Beaver Creek. Four days later he returned for the downhill and beat Kjus again, this time by a clear 0.31 seconds.
The moment sat inside a career of rare weight. A year earlier Maier had risen from a violent downhill crash at Nagano to win two Olympic golds; a year later he would post a then-record 2,000 World Cup points in a single season.
His career would close with 54 World Cup victories, third on the men's all-time list, and two returns from injuries that might have ended it. The shared super-G gold remains its own kind of rarity — a title won without a loser.
