LEVI, Finland — Mikaela Shiffrin got the Olympic slalom season off to a great start by dominating a World Cup race with the record-extending 102nd win of her career in Finnish Lapland on Saturday.
The American star took a commanding lead of more than a second in the first run, posted the fastest time again in the final run, and won the race by 1.66 seconds over second-placed Lara Colturi.
Shiffrin said, “It’s definitely a good feeling, it was great to run the race today. I felt really strong in both races.” She said she didn’t want to be too cautious in protecting her large lead.
“I was just feeling like: ‘Oh, don’t mess it up, like it’ll be embarrassing.’ But then, in the end, if you’re pushing as hard as possible, you can’t mess it up.”
Colturi, an Italian-born talent competing for Albania, achieved the best result of her career. Colturi turned 19 on Saturday.
All-rounder Emma Aicher finished third, 2.59 behind for her first podium in a Tech race. The German, who turned 22 last Thursday, won a downhill and a super-G last March.
Shiffrin’s teammate Paula Moltzon, who finished runner-up in the giant slalom at the season opener in Austria three weeks ago, was 2.46 off the lead in 19th, but improved to fourth, which she shared with Eicher’s teammate Lena Duerr.
Shiffrin and Moltzan are now ranked 1-2 in the overall standings after two races.
Slalom World Cup champion Zrinka Ljutić of Croatia finished fourth after the opening race and dropped to sixth.
Shiffrin laid the foundation for her 65th slalom victory with an aggressive first run.
“It was the best race I’ve ever done, it was perfect,” Shiffrin said after the opening race, calling repeating some of her best skiing from training “an amazing feeling.”
“In preparation for the whole summer I was really focusing a lot on giant slalom, so I didn’t get that many slalom days,” said the American, who finished fourth in the GS in October.
“But then when I trained for slalom, it was really important to have maximum quality, maximum intensity in each race.”
After recovering from a catastrophic crash in the GS a year earlier, Shiffrin announced before the season that she planned to reduce her schedule to slalom and GS and perhaps super-G heading into the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics in February.
Shiffrin won Olympic gold in slalom in 2014 and GS in GS four years later.
Nine of Shiffrin’s record 102 World Cup wins have come in the traditional season-opening slalom in Lapland, where the winner is given a reindeer as a prize.
No skier other than Slovakia’s Shiffrin or Petra Vlhova has won the race in the 14 editions since overall champion Tina Mays won in 2014.
Vlhova, the 2022 Olympic slalom champion, is still recovering from a knee injury she suffered in January 2024.
The men’s slalom on the same hill is scheduled for Sunday. The women travel to Austria for another slalom next weekend.
