Colorado’s Shiffrin starts off season with 70th career win

One of the most fitting congratulations for Mikaela Shiffrin arrived some five hours after she won the World Cup season opener on Saturday — and it came from another American skiing great.

“Inspiring to see you succeed and more importantly to see you smile. Congrats @Mikaelashiffrin,” her former teammate Lindsey Vonn wrote on Twitter.

Shiffrin was certainly all smiles after winning the giant slalom on an Austrian glacier on a perfect sunny day for her 70th World Cup victory, leaving her 12 wins short of the women’s record held by Vonn, who retired in 2019.

“My goal was to ski well, and with fire,” Shiffrin after the race, in which she fought a tight battle with GS world champion Lara Gut-behrami.

Shiffrin did ski well. The two-time Olympic champion ultimately edged her Swiss challenger by .14 as the pair left the rest of the field well behind, with defending overall World Cup champion Petra Vlhova a massive 1.30 seconds behind in third.

And Shiffrin did it with fire.

One reason it flared up were her teammates and coaches from the U.S. ski team, who went through an intense two-week preparation prior to Saturday’s race.

Not just Shiffrin benefited from the joined practice sessions: Four of the five American starters ended up scoring World Cup points. Nina O’brien even got a careerbest result in GS by finishing ninth.

Shiffrin said she also gained from the presence of her boyfriend, 2020 men’s overall World Cup champion Aleksander Aamodt Kilde. “He is so much fun to talk to about skiing,” Shiffrin said. “I love knowing that he is watching.”

The arrival of Kilde has brightened up Shiffrin’s life again, following two difficult years which included the loss of her grandmother in October 2019 and the death of her father less than four months later.