The men's parallel competition in the 2020 FIS Alpine Skiing World Cup was contested as a World Cup discipline separate from slalom for the first time in 2020. Prior to the season, FIS decided to combine parallel skiing events (including all of parallel giant slalom, parallel slalom, and city events (parallel slaloms held on courses built within cities)) into a new discipline, joining the existing disciplines of downhill, Super-G, giant slalom, slalom, and combined. The discipline winner would receive a small crystal globe, similar to the other disciplines. However, at the same time, FIS decided to drop the city events to reduce the amount of travel required during the World Cup season, planning to replace them with more parallel events at regular venues.
The parallel format was also changed to make the race more TV-friendly. Parallel races now began with one classic qualification run to determine the top 32, who advanced to the elimination phase of the main competition. The round of 32 used the existing run and re-run format, so that each competitor got to start from each side, but from the round of 16 forward, there was only one run per race and a direct knockout system—the loser of each race was gone. However, the new format immediately became controversial, as making two giant slalom courses equal in a single-run format proved close to impossible, and the first men's parallel giant slalom races suffered from "the luck of the draw" becoming determinative: all eight round-of-16 matches were won by the racer on the same randomly-selected course.
Ultimately, only two parallel events, both parallel giant slaloms, were scheduled and held in the 2019–20 season. Swiss skier Loïc Meillard won the second event and also won the first-ever discipline championship for men in parallel. At this time, individual parallel races were not included in the season finals, which were scheduled in 2020 for Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy but were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Standings #Skier PG PGTotal Loïc Meillard 291001292 Rasmus Windingstad 10031033 Stefan Luitz 802824 Thomas Tumler DNQ80805 Roland Leitinger 601373 Alexander Schmid 1360737 Thibaut Favrot 2640668 Henrik Kristoffersen 3626629 50116110 Žan Kranjec 1445 59 Lucas Braathen45145912 Tommy Ford 8505813 Aleksander Aamodt Kilde2036 5614 Mattias Rönngren 40DNS 4015 Simon Maurberger 232 3416 Justin Murisier 32DNS3217 Fabio Gstrein DNS292918 Filip Zubčić 6222819 Alexis Pinturault 52025 Pavel Trikhichev15102521 Luca De AliprandiniDNQ2424 Dominik Raschner24DNS24 Mathieu Faivre1682424 Ryan Cochran-Siegle22DNS2225 Giovanni BorsottiDNS1818 River Radamus18DNS18References
DNS = Did not start DNQ = Did not qualify
See also 2020 Alpine Skiing World Cup – Men's summary rankings 2020 Alpine Skiing World Cup – Men's overall 2020 Alpine Skiing World Cup – Men's downhill 2020 Alpine Skiing World Cup – Men's super-G 2020 Alpine Skiing World Cup – Men's giant slalom 2020 Alpine Skiing World Cup – Men's slalom 2020 Alpine Skiing World Cup – Men's combined World Cup scoring system
References
External links Alpine Skiing at FIS website