Ester Ledecká, overall leader of this season's women's World Cup downhill standings, is flying ahead of tomorrow's downhill at the FIS Alpine Skiiing World Cup in Austria ©Getty Images

Ester Ledecká is looking in good shape to defend her overall lead in the women's downhill standings, as the International Ski Federation World Cup takes place in Altenmarkt-Zuachensee, Austria, tomorrow.

The Czech skier, who became the first person to win Olympic gold in skiing and snowboarding at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, heads the current rankings with 150 points, ahead of Austria's Nicole Schmidhofer on 136 and Corinne Suter of Switzerland (125).

As the World Cup Tour returns to Altenmarkt-Zauchensee for the first time in three years, Ledecká has been going well in training on the famous slopes, finishing third in the first run and second in the second run.

In the first run she clocked 1min 49.38sec, just behind Schmidhofer on 1:49.05, with Germany's Kira Wiedle posting the fastest time of 1:48.81.

On today's second run, Ledecká registered 1:48.03, bettered only by the time of 1:47.92 recorded by home skier Ramona Siebenhofer,

Petra Vlhova of Slovakia, who beat overall World Cup leader Mikaela Shiffrin in the slalom at the Zagreb World Cup on January 4, was  22nd on 1:49.63.

Vlhova will seek to gain a favourable placing in tomorrow's downhill ahead of Sunday's two runs in her specialist distance of slalom, as the first of this season's three scheduled Alpine Combined events is completed.