GURGL – Mikaela Shiffrin earned her record-extending 99th career World Cup win Saturday, taking the quest for victory No. 100 to North America.
The American ski star held on to her first-run lead in the season's second slalom to beat Italian prodigy Lara Colturi, who starts for Albania, by 0.55 seconds and Swiss skier Camille Rast by 0.57. They both got their first career podium result.
Recommended Videos
Shiffrin next enters a 16-day North American portion of the World Cup starting next weekend, with a giant slalom and slalom in Killington, Vermont; two GS races in Mont-Tremblant, Quebec; and a super-G in Beaver Creek, Colorado.
“I guess there is a bit of pressure around it, but I'll try to ignore that,” said Shiffrin, who also won the first slalom of the season in Levi, Finland a week ago.
“Anyway, if it happens, it's wonderful. If it doesn't happen, kind of nothing to cry about in the grand scheme. But I hope to have a really good performance in front of the home crowd."
No other skier, male or female, has won more than 86 World Cup races. Shiffrin set the best mark when she overtook Swedish great Ingemar Stenmark in March 2023.
Shiffrin carried a lead from the first run, but acknowledged to being “really nervous at the top” before the start of her second run.
“I could hear all the women going down and their teams were cheering, and that always means they had a really good run. And it was getting darker,” said Shiffrin, adding she didn't "think it's happening today.”
Shiffrin initially extended her lead to more than seven-tenths of a second and only lost fractions of that over the last two sections.
“It feels really satisfying to have a really great run down this slope. What a wonderful day,” she said.
In the first run, Shiffrin wasn’t clean going into the steep of the Kirchenkar course but gained time on all competitors with a near-flawless section toward the finish.
“It’s a pretty strange surface, like cold and dry. It’s hard to be clean on the skis. So, I was feeling a little bit funky on some spots,” Shiffrin said after the opening run.
"But in the end, I kept pushing forward, just stayed on top of it and pushed to the finish. I find it to be really challenging on this condition to find the right setup to feel clean and to feel like you can unleash the skis.”
Swiss skier Wendy Holdener, who was second after the opening run, dropped to fourth, and Shiffrin’s teammate Paula Moltzan trailed by 1.10 seconds in sixth.
Olympic champion Petra Vlhova, Shiffrin’s biggest rival in slalom, hasn’t returned to racing yet after undergoing knee surgery last season.
Gurgl was a new venue on the women’s World Cup, after it staged a men’s race last season. The resort in the Austrian Alps is just a 15-kilometer drive from Soelden, where the traditional season opener took place four weeks ago.
The men race a slalom on the same hill on Sunday.
___
More AP skiing: https://apnews.com/hub/alpine-skiing