ARE, Sweden –
American skier Mikaela Shiffrin set the World Cup record for most career wins with 87 on Saturday when she won a slalom.
Shiffrin broke a tie with Ingemar Stenmark on the all-time wins list for both men and women. The Swede competed in the 1970s and 80s.
Shiffrin matched Stenmark’s mark of 86 victories with a victory in a giant slalom on Friday.
“It’s pretty hard to fathom,” Shiffrin said of the record.
After the final round, the American bent over and rested his head on his knees. Her crush, Taylor Shiffrin, came out and hugged her at the winners’ ceremony.
“My brother and sister-in-law are here and I didn’t know they would come; that makes this so special,” Shiffrin said.
Saturday’s result marked the American’s sixth slalom win of the season and his 53rd career win in the discipline.
Shiffrin dominated the first race and posted the fifth-fastest time in the second, 0.92 seconds ahead of Swiss skier Wendy Holdener.
In third place home favorite Anna Swenn Larsson was last to finish within a second of Shiffrin’s time.
“The best feeling is skiing in the second race, obviously when you want to win, you have the lead and so you have to be kind of smart, but also I wanted to be fast, and I wanted to ski in the second race like I wanted to do his race,” Shiffrin said. .
“I did exactly that and that’s amazing.”
Shiffrin has already locked up her fifth overall championship and titles in the slalom and GS disciplines.
“It’s very nice to race today. After such an awesome day yesterday, I don’t feel any pressure,” Shiffrin said after the opening race.
Mikaela Shiffrin starts the course in a slalom race in Are, Sweden.
(Alessandro Trovati/Associated Press)
The win gave Shiffrini a record 12 years to the day after her first World Cup race, at the age of 15 at a GS in Spindleruv Mlyn, Czech Republic.
Shiffrin will compete in three more races this season at next week’s World Cup Finals.
The race took place at a location where many of Shiffrin’s key career moments took place. In the Swedish lakeside resort, she won her first World Cup in 2012 and took slalom gold at the 2019 world championships, becoming the first skier to win a world title in a discipline four times in a row.
However, it was also where Are suffered a knee injury that kept him off the slopes for two months in the 2015-16 season, and was due to race again in March 2020 after the death of his father the previous month. , but those races were canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.