Grugger, Suter set the early pace

Austria's Hans Grugger and Switzerland's Fabienne Suter set the early pace in the men's and women's downhill training on Tuesday ahead of the World Cup finale.

American ski queen Lindsey Vonn and Switzerland's Didier Cuche will be the ones to beat in Wednesday's downhill races, but Grugger and Suter were the fastest down the Kandahar course after the morning's training run.

The World Cup finale starts on Wednesday and finishes on Sunday with downhill, giant slalom, super-G and slalom events to be contested.

Grugger set the pace of 1min 59.78sec with Norway's Aksel Lund Svindal, who won super-G gold, downhill silver and giant slalom bronze at the Vancouver Olympic Games, fifth fastest at 0.49sec with Cuche sixth at 0.73sec.

Cuche left Vancouver without an Olympic medal, but has already won this season's downhill World Cup title and is in contention for the 2010 overall crown here.

In the women's downhill training, Suter set the pace of 1min 38.03sec, but Olympic downhill and combined silver medallist Julia Mancuso was just behind her at 0.78sec.

Vonn, who clinched her third straight World Cup downhill title with victory in Crans Montana last weekend, is at 0.89sec in fourth.

Home favourite Maria Riesch was joint twelfth fastest at 1.75sec back.

In the overall standings, Vonn holds a commanding 245-point lead over Riesch and the contest is effectively a two-horse race with the German 324 points clear of third-placed Anja Paerson of Sweden.

With 100 points awarded for each of the four races, Riesch will need to pull off something special to over-take the United States' starlet here in the race for the overall title.

"I simply want to have a good (downhill) race, have some fun, enjoy it and hopefully win the slalom World Cup title," said Riesch with the slalom event set to take place on Saturday with the 2011 world championships to be held here.

The men's overall title is wide open with Austria's Benjamin Raich holding only a narrow lead.

Raich, who failed to win a medal at the Winter Olympics, stands 46 points ahead of Switzerland's Carlo Janka in second place.

Janka, who took the men's giant slalom Winter Games gold medal last month, is 127 points ahead of fellow countryman Cuche.

The five-day race programme sees both the women and men's downhill on Wednesday, followed by the women's giant slalom and men's Super-G on Thursday, the women's Super-G and men's giant slalom on Friday.

Both slalom events take place on Saturday before the team event on Sunday.