Norway’s Henrik Kristoffersen won the second slalom race of the weekend’s FIS Alpine Ski World Cup at Chamonix ©Getty Images

Norway’s mercurially talented Henrik Kristoffersen had one of his very good days as he won the second slalom race of the weekend’s Alpine Skiing World Cup at Chamonix.

On a day of startling fluctuations in form, yesterday’s winner, Clement Noël, failed to qualify for the second run and overall World Cup slalom leader Marco Schwarz of Austria missed the podium by three places.

For all Kristoffersen’s excellence as he earned his second World Cup win of the season with a combined total time of 1min 37.81sec, the eye-catching performance of the day came from Switzerland’s Sandro Simonet.

The 25-year-old, who won gold in the team event at the 2019 World Championships, barely qualified for the second run in 30th place but then produced the best time in the second run - 46.31sec as compared with Krisoffersen’s 47.48 - to earn third place, 0.66 back from the winner.

It was the first time in his career he had reached the podium at an International Ski Federation (FIS) World Cup.

Simonet’s performance recalled the previous day’s heroics from his team mate Luca Aerni, who improved 25 places in the second run to finish one place off the podium.

Amidst all this, Switzerland’s Ramon Zenhäusern was a model of consistency, replicating his second place of the day before as he finished 0.28 off Kristoffersen having moved up from 11th with the second-fastest second-run time of the day, 46.78.

The snow continued to soften the longer the race went on and it was clear that having the better first run was not an advantage by the time the top 10 were ready to race.

Of the top 10 from the first run, only three maintained their place, the rest all finished well down the ranking list.

After nine of the scheduled 11 World Cup men’s slalom races this season, Schwarz leads with 589 points from Zenhäusern, on 443, and Norway’s Sebastian Foss-Solevåg on 405.

After 25 of the 37 scheduled men’s races in the World Cup, Schwarz has now moved up to second place overall on 666 points behind France’s Alexis Pinturault, who finished joint eighth today, with Marco Odermatt of Switzerland third on 607.

Next up for the men’s slalom specialists will be the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in Cortina d’Ampezzo from February 9 to 21.