Shiffrin sets World Cup slalom mark
Coming off a recordbreaking season with 17 race wins, Mikaela Shiffrin didn’t need much time in the new campaign to reach yet another milestone.
The American set the all-time World Cup record for most slalom wins by any skier on Saturday at Levi, Finland, after earning her 41st career victory in the discipline at the seasonopening slalom race.
Shiffrin beat the 32-yearold best mark from Swedish great Ingemar Stenmark, who won 40 slaloms between 1974 and 1987. Shiffrin amassed her total in just seven years, having won her first race in December 2012.
“I don’t feel super emotional, I am just happy,” said Shiffrin, who usually refrains from focusing on records or statistics. “I am happy with my skiing for the first [slalom] race of the season.”
Shiffrin, the 2014 Olympic and four-time world champion, has held the women’s record since passing Marlies Raich’s tally of 35 slalom wins a year ago.
On Saturday, Shiffrin came from behind to defeat Petra Vlhova, runner-up to the three-time champion in the overall standings last season.
Vlhova, who won this race in 2017, led by 0.13 seconds after the opening run but skied out early in her final run and failed to finish, immediately after the American had posted the fastest run time by far.
“I had a solid first run and in the second run I was really attacking and fighting,” Shiffrin said. “I may have been a little bit lucky but we have no idea how [Vlhova] was going to finish.”
Wendy Holdener finished runner-up but trailed Shiffrin by 1.78 seconds, a country mile in a sport mostly decided by hundredths of a second.
New Zealand teenager Alice Robinson, who beat Shiffrin in the season-opening giant slalom in Austria last month, was sitting out the race with a knee injury.
ETC.
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