Vail ski racer River Radamus finished a career-best fourth place in the giant slalom at the Olympic Winter Games in China.

Radamus was the top American in the field, moving up in the rankings after finishing the first run sitting in 9th position.

Radamus finished 1.6 seconds off leader Marco Odermatt, of Switzerland, who laid down both the fastest first run at 1:02.93 and the fastest combined second run time of 2:09.35. The winner of a giant slalom race is the person whose posts the fastest combined time in both runs.

It was the first time snow fell during an Alpine skiing race at this year’s Olympics and the bad weather conditions caused the second run to be postponed by 1 hour, 15 minutes.

“It was a hard day, with the conditions, with such a long wait between the two runs,” Odermatt said. “It was more than five hours for me, it was such a long time to re-think everything and it was hard to stay focused. I tried to sleep some minutes in between.”

Zan Kranjec of Slovenia took silver, 0.19 seconds behind, and world champion Mathieu Faivre of France earned bronze, 1.34 behind. American Tommy Ford finished 12th, 3.06 seconds off Odermatt.

The skiers had been racing and training on artificial snow until the real thing started to fall on Saturday at the Yanqing Alpine Skiing Center. A second women’s downhill training run was canceled because of the conditions on Sunday.

Radamus described the course known as “The Ice River” as “a little bit bouncy.”

Radamus grew up in Edwards racing for Ski & Snowboard Club Vail, where his father Aldo Radamus is the former Executive Director.

The fourth-place result is a career best for Radamus, who has notched three top-10 giant slalom results on the World Cup this season.

—The Associated Press contributed to this report