Bots & Plume Stay Perfect in Sigulda, Steu & Kindl Take Title

From Sigulda, LAT

(March 2, 2024) – Martins Bots and Roberts Plume once again defended home ice in Sigulda to win their third straight FIL World Cup race to finish out the men’s doubles season as they held off Tobias Wendl and Tobias Arlt for gold.

Bots and Plume led by .060 ahead of Wendl and Arlt after the first run, with Austrians Juri Gatt and Riccardo Schöpf in third. In fourth were Thomas Steu and Wolfgang Kindl, who just needed a pair of clean runs to win the season title in their first year as a team.

In the second run Steu and Kindl slid to the lead and held that spot after Gatt and Schöpf’s second slide. Wendl and Arlt, who needed a top two run to guarantee a second place overall finish, put down another quick run to take the lead by nearly three tenths of a second.

The final team off was Bots and Plume, winners of both the full track and sprint race the weekend before.  Their start was just a bit quicker, and their slide was once again the quickest of the heat on their way to a .095 second victory over Wendl and Arlt, with Steu and Kindl third.

The win was the third straight and fourth in the season for Bots and Plume. In all three of those races, Wendl and Arlt finished second behind them to just barely hold off the Latvians by nine points in the overall standings.

Gatt and Schöpf finished the race in fourth, Hannes Orlamünder and Paul Gubitz fifth, and Dana Kellogg and Frank Ike sixth for the United States.

Americans Zack DiGregorio and Sean Hollander moved up from 11th to ninth in the second heat with the fifth quickest run of the heat.

Steu and Kindl’s title came in their first season as a team.

“This is unbelievable,” Kindl told FIL’s Kate Hansen after the race. “We were thinking that if we could work together then the project could be really good. But we were on the podium on nearly every race, and I really have no words!”

Steu also became the first doubles athlete to win a title with two different bottom men.

The final standings have Steu and Kindl ahead of Wendl and Arlt in second and Bots and Plume in third. Orlamünder and Gubitz finished the season in fourth, ahead of Gatt and Schöpf in fifth.

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