Mikaela Shiffrin has been racking up historic achievements since she was a teenager — including becoming the youngest Olympic slalom champion at the 2014 Sochi Games when she was 18 — and she added some more glitter Saturday at the world championships in St. Moritz, Switzerland.
Shiffrin became the first woman to win the slalom at three consecutive world alpine championships in 78 years, and she did it by the largest margin of victory in 47 years — a stunning 1.64 seconds. She also became the first U.S. woman to win two medals at a world championships since Lindsey Vonn in 2009. Shiffrin took silver in giant slalom Thursday.
“To be honest, I don’t really know what that means yet,” Shiffrin said in the medalists media conference of her historic three-peat. “I wasn’t thinking about it until somebody mentioned it to me like five days ago. Today my real focus was just on the day, on both my runs and my own skiing. I was trying not to worry about anybody else and it worked well.”
She has won the slalom at every major event since she was 17 — world championships in 2013, 2015 and 2017, plus the Olympics in 2014. When the World Cup resumes next weekend, she will have a huge lead in the overall standings, a pursuit that should end with her being crowned the youngest World Cup overall champion since 2003.
In Saturday’s first run, Shiffrin had a comfortable lead of 0.38 seconds over the home country favorite, Wendy Holdener of Switzerland. Winning the second run by 1.26 seconds was a margin that was shocking to the ski world. It certainly shocked her.
“When I saw 1.6, it was like, ‘Is the time wrong?’ ” Shiffrin said. “But I felt really good about my second run. The skiing was solid, really strong actually, so I knew it was fast, I just didn’t know how fast compared to the other girls. That was a really special moment.”
Christl Cranz of Germany was the last woman to win three straight world championships slalom titles — in 1939.
“It’s a long time ago,” Shiffrin said. “It’s difficult to perform so well in big events three consecutive times. I can understand why people haven’t done it.”
Given her remarkable achievements before she turns 22 in March, Shiffrin seems on a path to become one of the greatest ski racers in history if she remains healthy and motivated.
“Right now I’m still really motivated,” Shiffrin said. “I want to be the best skier, not just the fastest skier but the best technically. I want to be the strongest person and I want to be the most consistent as well. So far my career has been like that and I want to keep going with it. Now, especially going into speed disciplines as well, I have a lot of goals there. Hopefully some day I’d like to win in super-G and downhill, but I think it will take some time before I can do that consistently.
“It’s really a long road from here. I still feel like I just started.”
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