Australian alpine skier Melissa Perrine has won her second medal at the PyeongChang Winter Paralympics with bronze in the giant slalom vision-impaired class.
Perrine was third after Wednesday’s first run and improved her second attempt by 1.9 seconds to hold off fourth by more than three seconds in 17-degree temperatures.
But the 30-year-old, alongside sighted guide and coach Christian Geiger, was narrowly edged for silver.
Her overall time of two minutes 28.81 seconds was 0.27 seconds off Great Britain’s Menna Fitzpatrick, while Henrieta Farkasova clinched her third gold medal of the Games.
The Slovakian was 5.81 seconds ahead of Perrine in the same top three in the previous day’s super-combined when the Australian won bronze.
After promising results in Vancouver 2010, Perrine endured a nightmare Sochi campaign four years ago when she left with a fourth, three DNFs and a controversial disqualification for duct-taping an illegal sun visor to her helmet.
Perrine’s haul has rendered memories of her medal-less previous two campaigns forgotten.
“I’ll take it,” Perrine said.
“We went out there just to put two solid runs down and we finished the first run in a good place and we just tried to step it up a little bit in that run.
“I care about the skiing a lot more than I care about the medals. I’m so stoked the skiing was able to get me a medal, but I’m really happy with the skiing today.
“I just went out there to relax and have fun. I love this sport. I wanted to have a lot of fun out there today and I managed to do that.”
Perrine’s medals followed Simon Patmore’s snowboard cross gold to exceed the Australian count from Sochi 2014 (two bronze).
Perrine was fifth in both the downhill and super-G at the start of the Games and will contest the slalom on Thursday.
Despite the warmth, she said the course had held up.
“The course crew did a great job trying to get a really good surface together and I think it’s been a really fair one so far,” she said.
“I hope it stays like that for the whole field.”
