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SESTRIERE, Italy -- Tessa Worley won her second straight World Cup giant slalom Saturday after first-run leader Mikaela Shiffrin struggled in her second trip down the 2006 Turin Olympics course.Charging after placing third in the opening run, Worley captured her 10th career giant slalom win to match the French record set by Carole Merle between 1988 and 1993.Worley finished 0.15 seconds ahead of rising Italian skier Sofia Goggia and 0.29 in front of defending overall World Cup champion Lara Gut of Switzerland.Its a tough day to win, said Worley, the GS world champion in 2013. Those girls are fighting hard and I try to fight a bit harder.It was a memorable day for the French team with Alexis Pinturault winning a mens GS on home snow in Val dIsere.Worley also won a GS in Killington, Vermont, two weeks ago.Shiffrin, the American who won the slalom at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, lost a big chunk of time early in her second run after getting thrown off course and finished sixth.Shiffrins lead over Gut in the overall standings was cut to eight points, although shell be the favorite in a slalom on Sunday on the Giovanni Agnelli course.Goggia is third overall, 51 points back.It was Goggias fourth podium result in six races -- and three different disciplines -- this season.Goggia made serious mistakes in each run but her attacking style kept her in contention and kept the partisan crowd on its feet.Conditions were perfect, with the race held under clear, sunny skies and the snow hard and icy.A surprise came from Simone Wild, a 23-year-old Swiss racer, who placed seventh with the No. 27 bib.The womens World Cup circuit had not stopped in Sestriere since 2008.Julia Mancuso won the GS on the Agnelli course during the 2006 Olympics.The slope is pretty technical. Its pretty complete, Worley said. Evan Phillips Jersey . Numbers Game looks into the Canadiens securing the services of Thomas Vanek in a trade with the New York Islanders. The Canadiens Get: LW Thomas Vanek and a conditional fifth-round pick. Chance Sisco Jersey . It was just business as usual for the Thunder at home. Durant scored 32 points and the Thunder beat the Bulls 107-95 on Thursday night for their eighth straight win. https://www.cheaporioles.com/468i-boog-powell-jersey-orioles.html . -- Matt Kuchar and Harris English ran away with the Franklin Templeton Shootout, shooting a 14-under 58 on Sunday in the final-round scramble to break the tournament course record. Hoyt Wilhelm Jersey . - Blake Griffin had 30 points and 12 rebounds, J. Hanser Alberto Jersey . Badenhop was 2-3 with a 3.47 ERA in 63 relief appearances for Milwaukee this season. He is 18-20 in his career with three saves and a 3. There have been a number of great hockey teams from outside of North America. The 2006 Turin Olympic champions from Sweden had a Vezina winner, seven Stanley Cup winners, a Norris winner, three Art Ross winners and a Calder winner. The gold medal-winning Czech Republic team at the 1998 Nagano Olympics had two of the greatest players of the era in Jaromir Jagr and Dominik Hasek.With the World Cup of Hockey upon us, its a good time to examine the question of which international team was the best in history. Theres really only one answer: the 1980 Soviet Union team.To be fair, it could be any of the Big Red Machines teams between 1972 and 1984 because there was so little roster turnover, but the 1980 team melded the dominant teams of the 1970s with what would become the dominant teams of the 80s.The 1980 Soviet squad still had the Valeri Kharlamov-Vladimir Petrov-Boris Mikhailov line and other 70s stalwarts such as Helmuts Balderis and Alexander Maltsev. The team also featured Vladimir Krutov, Sergei Makarov, Slava Fetisov and Alexei Kasatonov when they were in their early 20s. And the legendary Vladislav Tretiak was in goal.They were close to unbeatable. In fact, it took a miracle to beat them.Al Michaels could not have summed it up better with Do you believe in miracles? New Jersey Devils GM Ray Shero told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2014, referring to the United States stunning Miracle on Ice upset of the Soviets in the Lake Placid Olympics. That was absolutely, positively a miracle. Thats what made it so special. Because the Russians were that good.How good? In February 1979, they faced an NHL All-Star team that featured an astounding 20 future Hall of Famers in a three-game series. The Soviets won two of the matchups, including Game 3 at Madison Square Garden in a 6-0 rout.In Eric Zweigs book, Twenty Greatest Hockey Goals, Fetisov said the 1980 team was probably the best team ever put together in the Soviet Union. We never thought of losing, never thought it could happen. Thats why they call it a miracle.The NHLers were the only ones really able to put up a fight. For example, the Finns played 66 games against their eastern neighbor between Jan. 1, 1970, and Dec. 31, 1980. They won two times and tied once.They dominated the game, said Juhani Tamminen, a former Team Finland captain who played in the WHA. Its almost not even up to discussion. In their time, they were superior to everybody else.The Finns had access to Russia, and several coaches made study trips to Moscow. They came back with the same shocking realization.They practiced aand trained around 1,200 hours a year, said Alpo Suhonen, former Team Finland head coach and the first NHL head coach from Europe.dddddddddddd In Finland, we practiced about a third of that, and the Swedes were about 100 hours ahead of us.They skated three times a day, perfecting both their individual skills and their teamwork. They had their set five-man units so everybody knew what the others were doing.While the Soviet players were thought of as robots because of their advanced tic-tac-toe plays and lack of wild goal celebrations, Suhonen said the foundation laid by Russian hockey coaching pioneer Anatoli Tarasov was based on creativity and getting the puck into an empty space.The thing that Viktor Tikhonov added when he became the head coach was military discipline, Suhonen said of the coach who took over the Soviet national team in 1977.Tarasov, known as the father of Russian hockey, had to be creative when launching the Soviet system after World War II. He looked to the arts -- theater and ballet, for example -- and to other sports, such as a game played on ice called bandy, to create a unique style.They arrived in the international stage with a completely new way of playing hockey, which changed the sport, said Leif Boork, head coach of the Swedish team that reached the Canada Cup final in 1984. And, as Tarasov liked to say, a copy is never as good as the original.In the Soviet Union, it was also easy to draft the right players to the Red Army team -- draft being the operative word -- that was the core of the national team.They were together for 11 months of the year, Boork said, and I remember seeing the players rush out of the Luzhniki Palace of Sports, the famous hockey arena in Moscow, and into the park just outside to meet with their family and friends quickly because it was time to leave again.Hakan Sodergren, a former Team Sweden forward, estimated that the Soviets were a generation more developed than the competition.They were so far ahead of us both physically and medically, he said. They were skilled, strong. They were individually excellent and played together as a team. And they had a great goalie in Vladislav Tretiak.In short, the Soviet way consisted of pooling the best talent into one team, practicing three times as much as the nearest competitor and working year-round.They were the best team, even at the 1980 Olympics, Tamminen said. They just happened to lose at the wrong time.It happens. ' ' '