Slovenia's Kranjec sat fourth going into his second run but showed his bottle to finish top of the podium by 0.19 seconds, with a time of 1min 28.80sec.

The 26-year-old saw off Loic Meillard in the process to reign supreme, as French skier Matthieu Faivre claimed bronze, edging out Germany's Stefan Luitz.

Hirscher meanwhile, the reigning Olympic champion, was looking for his 62nd World Cup victory but could not pull out his best form on the day.

The 29-year-old, who has already picked up four World Cup medals this season and is the defending overall champion, could only manage a time of 1:29.38 on his second run, for an overall result of 2:50.85.

That left him 0.77 behind Kranjec.

Despite the result, however, the man who sits joint third on the all-time list for most successful World Cup skiers is still top of this season’s rankings.

Elsewhere today a women's super-G contest went ahead in Val Gardena in Italy.

Taking the top prize there was another Slovenian, Ilka Stuhec, who in winning claimed her second World Cup gold in 24 hours.

The 2017 world champion, who also won Tuesday’s (December 18) downhill event, beat Tina Weirather of Liechtenstein and Nicole Schmidhofer of Austria who finished joint second to claim her first super-G win since returning from a serious knee injury.

While Stuhec came home in 1:31.97, Schmidhofer and Weirther both finished 0.05 seconds behind.

Jasmine Flury then came fourth by 0.06 seconds.

The result means Stuhec climbs nine places into fourth for the overall super-G standings.

Mikaela Shiffrin from the United States remains top despite sitting out of the events in Italy.