In her first slalom since the Olympics, Mikaela Shiffrin earned her 109th World Cup win, her 72nd in slalom alone and a record-tying eighth World Cup slalom victory in one season.
Shiffrin prevailed by 94 hundredths of a second over German Emma Aicher combining times from two runs in Åre, Sweden.
It’s a special venues for Shiffrin — site of her first World Cup victory in December 2012, her planned return to the circuit after her dad passed away in 2020 (races were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic) and her record-breaking 87th World Cup win in 2023.
“This is one of the places I just feel a little bit at home, like my heart feels a bit at home,” Shiffrin told media in Are on Sunday. “So that’s a really helpful thing, especially these races in the end of the season that you get kind of a little bit of a break being really uncomfortable.”
ALPINE SKIING: Full Results | Broadcast Schedule
It’s her eighth win in nine World Cup slaloms this season, tying the record for most slalom victories in one season that she hit in 2018-19 and shares with Croatian Janica Kostelic, who did so in 2000-01.
Shiffrin can claim the record outright by winning the World Cup Finals slalom on March 24 in Norway.
Also at the World Cup Finals in Norway from March 21-25, Shiffrin can clinch a female record-tying sixth World Cup overall title, the biggest annual prize in the sport.
Austrian Annemarie Moser-Pröll is the only woman to win six World Cup overall titles, all in the 1970s.
Shiffrin leads Aicher by 140 points in this season’s overall standings with four races left in the 37-race campaign that began in October — one each of downhill, super-G, giant slalom and slalom at the World Cup Finals.
Each race winner receives 100 points on a descending scale — 80 points for second place, 60 points for third, 50 for fourth, 45 for fifth and so on.
Aicher, who races all four disciplines, must finish on the podium in at least one of the first two races of the World Cup Finals — the downhill and super-G next Saturday and Sunday — to have any chance to seize the lead from Shiffrin going into the last two races of the Finals in Shiffrin’s best events of slalom and giant slalom.
“We get a really exciting sort of finale to the season,” Shiffrin said. “I mean, (Aicher) deserves it, too. She’s skiing the best of everybody in all disciplines. So I will fight, but I want to take my hat off to her for the season she had.”
✔️ Win 109⁰
— U.S. Ski & Snowboard Team (@usskiteam) March 15, 2026
✔️ Slalom win 72⁰
✔️ Åre win 8 ⁰@MikaelaShiffrin does it again. 👑#stifelusskiteam pic.twitter.com/aB3cWMvsO1
