COPPER MOUNTAIN, Colo. — Mikaela Shiffrin’s latest slalom win comes with a nice prize: A spot on her fourth Olympic team.
The two-time Olympic champion officially secured a spot on the U.S. team for the Milano Cortina Games by winning the slalom race at the Copper Mountain World Cup. In commanding fashion, no less. Shiffrin finished with a combined time of 1:48.75, 1.57 seconds ahead of Germany’s Lena Duerr.
‘If you asked me when I was 8, 9, 10 years old, I don’t know if I could really say that I’d make one. (A fourth Olympics) is pretty incredible,’ Shiffrin said. ‘When you’re at the top of sport, some of these things, they become like an expectation. The world just expects it. `How excited are you to go to the Olympics?’ Technically, I haven’t qualified yet.
‘But when I can say I’ve qualified, that’s a huge step and we have to celebrate those moments.’
There was plenty to celebrate Sunday. The win was the 104th of Shiffrin’s career, extending her record for World Cup wins. It also made her three-for-three in slalom races this season, and she’s won five of the last six going back to last season.
The one outlier? A third-place finish in Are, Sweden.
‘It’s inspiring to see,’ U.S. teammate Paula Moltzan said. ‘That second run, the conditions are really tough, it’s a hometown crowd and she just handles everything with such grace.
‘Nina (O’Brien) and I were standing here watching, being like, `Damn. That’s good skiing.’ So it’s cool to see that.’
Moltzan finished eighth overall after an impressive second run. Still feeling the effects of a crash in the giant slalom Saturday, she struggled in the first run Sunday and was 12th. But she roared back with the fourth-fastest time on the second run and climbed four spots to secure her third top-10 finish of the season.
O’Brien finished 26th.
‘I am excited with my slalom right now. It’s very consistent,’ Moltzan said. ‘Slalom is not a sport of consistency a lot of time. Unless you’re Mikaela Shiffrin.’
Shiffrin had a lead of 0.28 seconds after the first run, and three skiers were within a second of her. While that’s a pretty significant lead in a sport that can be decided by hundredths of a second, anything can happen on a ski hill. Especially when snow is falling, clouds are thickening and the course got more and more rutted as the second run went on.
Switzerland’s Wendy Holdener and Austria’s Katharina Liensberger, who were second and third behind Shiffrin after the first run, both made large enough mistakes that it cost them their spots on the podium. Katharina Truppe, fifth in the first run, also slipped in the standings.
But as Shiffrin stood in the starting gate, she could hear the cheers of the raucous home crowd. That helped power her through, she said, and she sliced her way down the course, switching edges easily and carving tight turns around each gate.
The crowd got louder as her lead built and erupted as she crossed the finish line. Shiffrin threw her arms out to the side, a winner once again.
‘Sometimes when I hear people cheering, I’m like, `Oh God, it’s a home race.’ Sometimes it makes me feel pressure,’ Shiffrin said. ‘And today it was literally the louder they were, the harder I pushed. I just let them take me down the hill.’
Shiffrin had the second-fastest time on the second run, the first slalom this season she did not win both runs. She lost some speed on the second section of the course, same as she had the first run, but closed with a furious push to finish 0.18 behind France’s Caitlin McFarlane, who finished 12th overall.
But that is nitpicking. Shiffrin is dominating the field this season, winning each of the first three slaloms by 1.2 seconds or more.
‘Nothing really ever shocks me about her skiing,’ Moltzan said. ‘She’s just authoritative and commanding. It’s just the way she is.’
Easy as Shiffrin makes it look, though, this win was anything but. This is the longest slalom course of the season, and it’s also at the highest altitude. Shiffrin had said after the giant slalom Saturday that recovery, both overnight and between runs, was going to be critical.
Even with that, it took everything in her for Shiffrin to keep pushing until she crossed the finish line of the second run.
‘Today was so hard,’ Shiffrin said. ‘I was really very nervous today. And it wasn’t really about the skiing or about what happens between start and finish. It’s like when you go into a really hard, hard interval and you know it’s going to be terrible and you have to do it anyway and you’re just like, `But no. I don’t actually have to do this. I could just not, and I would be comfortable. I could be comfortable instead of being really, really uncomfortable.’
‘But here we are.’
A winner, and an Olympian, again.