Good luck trying to catch Mikaela Shiffrin. Now or ever.
Shiffrin won her 100th World Cup race Sunday, less than three months after a crash in her first attempt at the milestone left her with a puncture wound in her abdomen and severe muscle trauma. It comes in her sixth race since returning from injury.
‘It certainly feels like I’ve been fighting a lot lately,’ Shiffrin said. ‘It’s been hard to find the right momentum and the right flow and to work through the injury and 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.
‘Today was just an amazing day in the middle of some really tough months,’ she added. ‘I’m very thankful for this day.’
When Shiffrin crossed the finish line of the slalom in Sestriere, Italy, she fell to the snow, overwhelmed by the moment and all it’s taken for her to get to it.
On Nov. 30, in her first opportunity to get her 100th win, Shiffrin crashed during the second run of a giant slalom race in Killington, Vermont. She was in the lead when she lost an edge, hitting one gate at full speed and somersaulting into another before coming to rest against the safety netting.
‘There’s a puncture and then basically whatever stabbed in there did a little dancey dance inside of my obliques and basically tore a cavern into my oblique muscles. That’s what’s causing bleeding and inflammation and just pain, in general,’ Shiffrin said in a Dec. 4 update.
‘This is another fairly ambiguous injury and really hard to put a timeline of when I’ll be either back on snow or back to racing,’ she added.
Shiffrin was bedridden for several weeks and needed surgery in mid-December to ward off an infection. She missed almost two months before returning to the World Cup circuit in Courchevel, France, on Jan. 30. She paired with Breezy Johnson to win the team combined at the world championships two weeks later, but said recovery would be an ongoing effort the rest of the season.
That was evident in the first two races in Sestriere, both giant slaloms. She looked tentative on the longer, faster courses and was so far off the pace Saturday that she didn’t even qualify for the second run.
Now look at her. Not only back on the podium, but the very top of it.
Shiffrin posted the fastest time in the first run, finishing 0.09 seconds ahead of Croatia’s Zrinka Ljutic, a three-time winner this season. She got out of the gate strong on the second run and was in control throughout, displaying the aggressively fluid style that’s become her trademark.
Though Shiffrin has said she’s still working on her endurance, she kept pushing until the very end. She finished 0.61 seconds ahead of Ljutic. U.S. teammate Paula Moltzan was third.
While her team and fans began celebrating, Shiffrin didn’t show emotion immediately – in part because she didn’t know where she’d finished.
‘I didn’t know if (the scoreboard) said fourth or first. One hundred times later, and I still can’t find the darned scoreboard,’ Shiffrin said with a laugh.
Once she realized she’d won, however, the emotions took hold. She fought tears in the finish area and in her post-race interview, and several times had to put her face in her hands. By the time she came back out for the victory ceremony, Shiffrin was all smiles. She also was sporting a new pair of gloves, ones that had ‘100’ emblazoned in gold on them.
The victory also was Shiffrin’s 155th time on a World Cup podium, tying Ingemar Stenmark’s record.
‘It takes time to get the mind in the right state, to take on ski racing and the full speed,’ Shiffrin said. ‘These top women, I can see how powerful they are and how secure they are, to take the speed from the course and to make it stronger. I’m not there.
‘The mountain ahead of me to climb is steep and long. If I get there – when I get there – it will be very sweet. But for now, I just have to take this day and be grateful for it because it’s a small moment in the middle of many tough moments that makes me feel that maybe I can be good again.’
Stenmark’s record of 86 career World Cup wins was once considered untouchable, standing for 30-plus years despite the best efforts of Lindsey Vonn, Marcel Hirscher, Hermann Maier and Alberto Tomba. But Shiffrin not only broke Stenmark’s mark, getting her 87th win in March 2023, she has blown past it.
She has not said how much longer she’ll ski but, at 29, she’s still in the prime of her career. And with the win rate she already has – at least five victories a season for the last 11 years, with the exception of the injury- and COVID-shortened 2020-21 season – Shiffrin joins Michael Phelps, LeBron James and Simone Biles on that rare list of athletes whose records truly are unbeatable.
Vonn, who came out of retirement this year, is the next-closest to Shiffrin with 82 wins. After that, the active skiers with the most World Cup wins are Lara Gut-Behrami with 46 and Marco Odermatt with 45.
‘I don’t know that it’s possible to dream about a milestone like this. It’s too big. It’s too long, it takes too much,’ Shiffrin said Sunday. ‘I always dreamed about good turns and step by step and try to be better tomorrow than I was today. That dream for me is big enough.’
Shiffrin, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, has never been driven by records or accolades. To the contrary, viewing her career through that limited prism has always made her uncomfortable. It’s the process that fuels her, that never-ending quest to get a little bit better every time she puts on skis or to see the work she’s been doing in training carry over to a race.
But she was determined to take a different view as she approached this 100th victory, trying to appreciate it because of the way others do. She’s also hoping to use the spotlight that comes with these milestones to bring attention to Share Winter, a foundation that brings winter sports to kids and communities that historically have not had access to them.
Shiffrin donated $10,000 to Share Winter for her 100th win, and challenged fans and sponsors to join her to get the total to $100,000. That would allow Share Winter to fund an entire season of skiing for 200 children.
‘One of the most beautiful things we can do as athletes is to share this passion and this love for the winter and the outdoors and the mountains with more of the world,’ Shiffrin said. ‘When you look around at the fans and everybody here cheering and enjoying the weather and the mountains and the sport, I wish there were even more people that understood the beauty of it.’
There are two more technical races, a GS and slalom in Are, Sweden, before the World Cup finals next month in Sun Valley, Idaho.
‘It’s step by step,’ Shiffrin said. ‘Also, to stand in the start gate and take the mentality of what I want to do (so it) is what I actually do, that’s not been totally connected. Today it was and that’s really – that feels good for the soul.’
(This story was updated with new information.)
