★ The Sports Examiner: Chronicling the key competitive, economic and political forces shaping elite sport and the Olympic Movement.★
★ To get the daily Sports Examiner Recap by e-mail: sign up here! ★
≡ SHIFFRIN WINS 100th! ≡
After returning from her November crash in just two months to winning a Team Combined gold medal at the FIS World Championships, Alpine star Mikaela Shiffrin had been advancing quickly but carefully.
At the World Cup races in Sestriere (ITA), she was cautious during the Friday and Saturday Giant Slaloms, finishing 25th and 33rd, in fact missing the cut for the final on Saturday for the first time in more than 14 years on the circuit.
All that led to Sunday’s Slalom, a discipline in which she is unsurpassed, with 63 wins of her total of 99 coming in.
Skiing fourth, Shiffrin looked like she has so many times before, ripping down the slope and timing 53.79 for the lead after the first run. But she was only 0.09 ahead of rising Croatian Zrinka Ljutic.
Waiting for everyone else to go on the second run, Shiffrin saw teammate Paula Moltzan, fourth after the first run, move into the lead with a quality second run and a 1:50.97 total. Austria’s Katharina Liensberger could not match that and totaled 1:51.09, meaning Moltzan was good for at least the bronze.
Ljutic also had some trouble on her second run, but taking the lead and finishing at 1:50.94 and bringing up Shiffrin with a chance for her 100th World Cup win.
No doubt, as she skied confidently and had the fourth-fastest second run and totaled 1:50.33 for an 0.61 win over Ljutic, with Moltzan third.
No. 100. And Shiffrin, still just 29, also climbed into a tie with Swedish star Ingemar Stenmark, who had 155 World Cup medals in his career from 1973-89. She’ll own that record, of course, quickly.
Said Shiffrin afterwards:
“It’s been hard to find the right momentum and the right flow and to work through the injury and to come back and compete with these women who are skiing so strong and so fast. I have wondered in the last weeks so many times whether it is the right thing to come back.
“But in the end, in order to keep moving forward, and to finish this recovery, I have to be in the start gate, and I have to experience these emotions when they’re good and when they’re bad, and that’s really important. Today was just an amazing day in the middle of some really tough months.
“Today a lot of things had to go right for me and actually wrong for some others. Camille [Rast/SUI, the Slalom world champion], on the first run, was just so fast [but crashed close to the finish]. A lot of things had to go right in my direction for this to happen but in the end, I did something right too.”
Some statistics to appreciate:
Shiffrin’s World Cup wins (100):
● 63 Slalom
● 22 Giant Slalom
● 5 Super-G
● 4 Downhill
● 1 Combined
● 3 City Events
● 2 Parallel Slalom
Shiffrin’s World Cup medals (155):
● 87 Slalom
● 43 Giant Slalom
● 10 Super-G
● 7 Downhill
● 1 Combined
● 5 City Events
● 2 Parallel Slalom
Shiffrin’s wins by season:
● 2013: 4
● 2014: 5
● 2015: 6
● 2016: 5
● 2017: 11
● 2018: 12
● 2019: 17
● 2020: 6
● 2021: 3
● 2022: 5
● 2023: 14
● 2024: 9
● 2025: 3 so far
Shiffrin has won as astonishing 36.0% of her World Cup starts – 100 in 278 – second only to Stenmark’s 86 wins in 231 starts, or 37.2%. Wow.
There are two more Giant Slalom and Slalom events left on the World Cup calendar, including a rare chance for Shiffrin to be saluted by American fans as the World Cup Final happens to be in Sun Valley, Idaho from 22-27 March.
¶
★ Receive our exclusive, weekday TSX Recap by e-mail by clicking here.
★ Sign up a friend to receive the TSX Recap by clicking here.
★ Please consider a donation here to keep this site going.
For our updated, 895-event International Sports Calendar for 2025 and beyond, by date and by sport, click here!
