Mikaela Shiffrin lays claim as best ever after record-setting 87th World Cup win

Mikaela Shiffrin could finally exhale after flying past the finish line and into sporting immortality.

The American star of the piste emphatically staked her claim as the greatest ever alpine skier on Saturday, taking first in a slalom for her 87th career World Cup win and eclipsing Ingemar Stenmark’s record for career victories by a male or female skier.

And it wasn’t even close.

On a sun-splashed morning in the Swedish lakeside resort of Åre, Shiffrin attacked her opening run with the purpose and technical mastery that’s become her calling card over more than a decade in the sport’s top flight, opening a yawning lead of more than a second over all but two of her competitors.

From there she closed in style, posting the fifth-fastest second run for a combined time of 1min 41.77sec that managed to build on her lead, 0.93sec better than second-placed Wendy Holdener of Switzerland. Sweden’s Anna Swenn Larsson finished 0.95sec off the pace for third.

Afterward Shiffrin crouched over at the waist in the finish area and cradled her head on her knees as the weight of the moment set in. One day after winning a giant slalom on the same mountain to move level with Stenmark atop the all-time leaderboard, Shiffrin blew away the field to one-up the great Swedish star of the 1970s and 80s, who had owned the record for more than four decades since first catching Austria’s Annemarie Moser-Pröll in January 1982.

When Stenmark finally retired seven years later on the magic number of 86, the mark was thought to be unbreakable. Shiffrin has managed to topple it before her 28th birthday and in four fewer seasons: a Colorado girl emerging as the greatest of them all in a sport historically dominated by Europeans.

“Pretty hard to comprehend that thought,” Shiffrin said. “Holy crap.”

It was a full-circle moment for Shiffrin on Saturday, coming on the same hill where she’d won her first World Cup race as a 17-year-old prodigy back in 2012. Barely one year after, she’d become the youngest Olympic slalom champion in history with an astounding gold in Sochi, cementing her supremacy in alpine skiing’s most technical discipline by winning the next three world championships in which she competed.

Starting with her fifth season on the tour, Shiffrin blossomed from a slalom specialist into perhaps the world’s best all-around skier, branching out into the speed events with success and winning her first of her five overall World Cup titles, the prize more coveted in the sport than even Olympic gold. She remains the only skier, male or female, to win World Cup races in all six disciplines: slalom, giant slalom, downhill, super-G, combined and parallel slalom.

By the end of the 2019 campaign, she’d racked up an eye-popping 60 career wins and the all-time record appeared a fait accompli. But the abrupt death of her father in an accident, only four months after losing her maternal grandmother, left Shiffrin shattered and questioning whether she wanted to continue.

“I wondered if it was really worth it,” she told NBC’s Today show. “There was a really long time that I didn’t really feel like it was worth it to care about anything, so it seemed like I’m not going to go ski race again because the most fundamental thing of an athlete is that you have to care about your sport and you have to care about doing well at your sport, and I just didn’t.”

She elaborated on her grieving process in an essay published last year.

“That’s the way grief works,” Shiffrin wrote. “It’s not linear. It’s not a climb up a mountain. It’s more like a maze.”

Shiffrin’s final approach on Stenmark’s record has gone largely unnoticed back home in the United States, where the races have mostly aired in the middle of the night across a confusing hodgepodge of streaming services. For a vast majority of Americans, the images of a tearful Shiffrin balled up on the south side of Xiaohaituo Mountain at the end of her nightmarish Beijing Olympics – where she skied out of the slalom, giant slalom and the slalom portion of the combined and failed to win an individual medal – are their most recent memory of the Vail native.

That’s the cruel reality in a nation where skiing only breaks through the crowded sports marketplace once every four years. But it was during the lowest week of a career defined by dizzying highs that Shriffin, whose three Olympic medals include gold in slalom in 2014 and in giant slalom in 2018, showed the depth of her character. Rather than rushing through the mixed zone and hiding from the media, she spent hours fielding questions amid her crisis of confidence, handling all of it with a remarkable self-awareness, humility, empathy and often brutal honesty.

“I’m not going to fail bigger than that. Probably. And I survived it,” Shiffrin said earlier this year. “I realized that pretty much everything is survivable. Everything that is going to happen in my ski career is fully survivable. No matter what it is, whether it’s great or it’s terrible, it’s just not the end of the world. There’s bigger things that happen in life. And I’ve experienced it.”

She’s bounced back with verve from her Beijing disappointment, finishing last season on a high note with another overall World Cup title and entering the 2022/23 campaign with renewed vigor. Shiffrin has won a tour-best 13 races this season – second only to her career-high 17-win campaign in 2018/19 – while clinching her fifth overall title. And she’s not done yet. The World Cup finals are next week in Andorra, where Shiffrin will be among the favorites in the slalom, giant slalom and super-G.

Shiffrin, who has won 51 more races than any other active skier, earned her 87th win on Saturday in her 246th career start: a preposterous 35% win rate in a trade where the top stars can go years between victories, making her one of the most dominant competitors in all of sports.

It also marked her sixth slalom win of the season and the record-extending 53rd career win in her preferred discipline.

With Stenmark’s record bested, Shiffrin is through the looking glass. She plans to compete at least through the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina D’Ampezzo. Nothing is guaranteed in a sport with a 100% injury rate, but the American’s miraculously clean bill of health suggests her winning is far from finished. Stenmark himself has said that he fully expects Shiffrin to break the 100-win mark. At her current pace? It could happen as soon as next year.

Most worrying of all for her rivals: she remains as hungry as ever.

“It’s pretty hard to describe and not over yet, which is even more ridiculous,” she said on Wednesday. “I shouldn’t feel pressure, but somehow I feel something in my heartbeat. That’s the anticipation that we want to feel in ski racing. I have it. It’s stronger than ever.”