American Shiffrin captures another slalom title in Vermont
Mikaela Shiffrin had one of those days on Sunday, the kind her competitors on the World Cup have come to dread.
On a day when cold wind gusts and angry snow squalls raked Killington, Shiffrin won the first run convincingly, and then skied brilliantly on a brutal second course to distance herself further from her rivals.
Shiffrin, who was second in Saturday’s giant slalom to Germany’s Viktoria Rebensburg, picked up her first win of the season, and made it look almost easy.
She finished with a combined tworun time of 1 minute, 40.91 seconds, 1.64 seconds ahead of Petra Vlhova of Slovakia. Austria’s Bernadette Schild finished third in 1:43.58, a distant 2.67 seconds back.
Shiffrin also won the slalom at Killington last year, when the World Cup returned to Vermont for the first time since 1978.
Like the first run, the second run Sunday took place under gray skies, but it was noticeably colder and windier. And the course, hard and fast, was unforgiving. Seven of the 30 skiers failed to finish, including Switzerland’s Wendy Holder, who was closest to Shiffrin after the first run.
But Shiffrin had a dominant performance on a very tough hill.
She credited a blazing start in the first run for picking her up. “That start was the attitude I wanted to take into today,” she said, making a statement by the time she got to the first interval, which was just 10 seconds into the run. She skied that short span about a third of a second faster than anyone else.
She brought the same attitude into the second run. “I wanted to be aggressive,” she said. “I wanted to have the same mentality as the first run: Be smart, but let it fly. I had that feeling on both runs today.”
Vlhova had won the last two slaloms on the World Cup - the final race of the previous season, at Aspen, Colorado, and the first of this season, at Levi, Finland.
She has come to realize how difficult it is to beat Shiffrin. “You can’t mistakes and still beat Mikaela,” Vlhova said.
On Sunday, she didn’t have a great first run, and she made a mistake on the flats in the second run. She was surprised that she was in front when she crossed the line, where she stayed until Shiffrin skied.
Shiffrin now leads the overall World Cup standings with 305 points. With a win and a secondplace finish each, Shiffrin and Vlhova are tied for the slalom points lead.
For Shiffrin, this was her 26th World Cup slalom win, making her third all time. At just 22, she has won 32 races in all disciplines, ninth alltime. And the Killington slalom was her sixth World Cup win in the United States. Only Switzerland’s Vreni Schneider (8) and American Tamara McKinney (7) have won more.
“This was even sweeter than last year,” Shiffrin said, noting that in 2016 she was “almost incapacitated by nerves” to be competing in Vermont. While she lives now in Colorado, she has family ties to Vermont and neighboring New Hampshire, and spent some of her formative years skiing at Burke Mountain Academy. This year, she said, she felt more under control.
Her family joined her on the podium again after Sunday’s win. The race drew about 16,000 people, nearly as many as on Saturday, when organizers reported 18,000 attendees, the most for a women’s World Cup race.
At her post-race news conference, she called up a young girl, Gabriella, who she said had been through some tough times, and presented her with the flowers she’d received for winning. She advised her to “keep on chugging. Sometimes it gets tough, but I’m really proud of you, and proud of your smile.”
A junior ski racer from Hunter Mountain in New York, Gabriella has a chronic illness, juvenile idiopathic arthritis. Shiffrin also gave Gabriella a teddy bear and the racing bib she’d worn, and autographed her ski helmet.
For both Shiffrin and Gabriella, it was a day to remember.