Mikaela Shiffrin dominates again in slalom for record-breaking 103rd World Cup victory

Mikaela Shiffrin won her second slalom race of the Olympic-year Alpine skiing season on Sunday, giving her a record-extending 103rd career World Cup victory.

The American star won again in Gurgl, Austria, after winning in Levi, Finland, the previous week. Shiffrin’s third consecutive World Cup slalom victory comes after she won the 2024-25 season finale in Sun Valley, Idaho, in March.

Shiffrin won in 1:48.11, 1.23 seconds ahead of her closest opponent, after earning the fastest time in the first run as well. A week earlier, Shiffrin won by 1.66 seconds in Levi.

“It was pretty much exactly how I expected,” Shiffrin said. “It wasn’t easy, but I knew the others were pushing. So there is no choice. “You have to go.”

In both Levi and Gurgl, Lara Colturi, Albania’s 19-year-old emerging star, was the leading contender. She had the second-best first run Sunday and did enough in the second to beat Switzerland’s Camille Rast, a two-time World Cup slalom champion. Rast finished third, 1.41 seconds behind.

On a difficult day with changing conditions, several elite skiers struggled with missing gates, falls, and time-consuming blunders. Katharina Liensberger of Austria, who won silver in slalom in Beijing in 2022, failed to finish the first run. Croatia’s Zrinka Ljutić, who won the Crystal Globe for overall slalom previous season, skied out during the second run.

Americans A.J. Hurt and Nina O’Brien both crashed, with Hurt skidding just before the finish gate.

“It’s very special, or like, unique conditions,” Shiffrin explained after the first run. “Very dry, and with the freezing temps, it is really aggressive. So it’s difficult to handle on the skis, and I certainly felt that way. … It’s not as forgiving as most conditions we ski in.”

The sun came out for the afternoon second run, and Shiffrin described it as “totally different” from the first. “It was manageable,” she remarked.

Shiffrin’s American partner, Paula Moltzan, described the first-run conditions as “a bit chaotic.” She was sixth after the first leg, briefly led after the second, and finished fifth.

Shiffrin now has 103 career Alpine skiing World Cup victories. She has held the top place since 2023, when she passed Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark with win number 87. Sixty-six of those victories have been in slalom.

Shiffrin injured herself during a giant slalom competition in Killington, Vermont, about a year ago, causing her to miss two months of skiing. When she returned in January, giant slalom remained difficult, both psychologically and physically.

Shiffrin, however, quickly regained her slalom form. She won twice in the discipline in the latter month of last season and raced the slalom leg of a gold-medal performance alongside Breezy Johnson in the team combined event at the world championships in February.

She started the season with a fourth-place finish in giant slalom in Sölden, Austria, her best performance since the injury.

With the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics less than three months away, Shiffrin is once again the clear favorite in slalom. After failing to win any medals in Beijing, she has decided to focus on her strongest events in Italy.

This article was originally published in The Athletic.

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