MILAN — In her third and final opportunity to medal at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, American Alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin took a sizable lead in the slalom after the first of two runs Wednesday.
Shiffrin stormed down a Cortina d’Ampezzo course with nearly 600 feet of vertical drop to finish in 47.13 seconds after her first run, 0.82 of a second ahead of the rest of the field.
Skiers take two runs in slalom and the times are combined to determine medals. The second run will begin at 7:30 a.m. EST.
Lena Duerr of Germany stood in second after the first run, with Sweden’s Cornelia Oehlund third.
“It was a really good run, for me it felt really clean and really active but also a little bit on the limit,” Shiffrin told NBC after her race. “There were a couple moments where I thought I could easily be off this course right now but just keep pushing and keep fighting and in the end, I got to the finish.”
The slalom is Shiffrin’s strongest event. Of her record 108 World Cup victories in Alpine skiing, 71 have come in slalom. At the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Shiffrin — then 18 years old — earned the gold medal in slalom to become the youngest skier ever to win.
Yet she has struggled to replicate that dominance in the glare of the Olympics, with her last medal coming in 2018. Shiffrin also is still not yet two years removed from a November 2024 crash during a giant slalom race that left her with a puncture wound in her side and what she has described as crash-induced PTSD.
At these winter games, Shiffrin and Breezy Johnson combined to finish fourth in the team combined event and 11th in giant slalom. Three days before taking her slalom lead, Shiffrin said on Instagram that “my skiing in the first race didn’t come together the way I visualized. I fought for every hundredth and didn’t totally find the right execution. This was certainly cause for some disappointment.”
But there was no disappointment after Wednesday’s first run, which Shiffrin recapped with a smile.
“Today I felt pretty excited,” Shiffrin said. “It’s hard not to be excited for days like today. Sunny and it’s just beautiful. I had a little bit of butterflies for sure, that’s just going to be part of this day, but I feel pretty prepared to take on the nervousness and it’s just about doing my skiing.
“I’m really focused (on the) start, to the gates to the finish. What’s happening between the start and the finish and the rest of it is not important.”
Greif reported from Milan.