There are 41 scheduled World Cup races this season. Mikaela Shiffrin has never started more than 30 events in one campaign. After skiing the first seven this fall, and more than doubling the next-best woman in World Cup points, it may soon come time for a rest.
Perhaps this weekend. Perhaps in Shiffrin’s best event, a slalom (albeit a parallel slalom, different than the traditional, Olympic format).
Shiffrin is scheduled to start the first of two World Cup events this weekend, a super-G in St. Moritz, Switzerland, on Saturday (4:30 a.m. ET, Olympic Channel: Home of Team USA and live streaming on NBC Sports Gold).
Later Saturday, a 30-minute special on Shiffrin’s historic 2018-19 season, titled “Mikaela’s Masterpiece,” will air on NBCSN at 2 p.m. ET. A trailer is here.
It’s TBD whether she will come back for Sunday’s parallel slalom (7:30 a.m., Olympic Channel and NBC Sports Gold). She will announce after Saturday’s race, according to U.S. Ski & Snowboard. It’s rare to have a speed event (downhill or super-G) and a technical event (slalom or giant slalom) at the same World Cup stop.
Parallel events can be more demanding than the usual format where skiers take two runs and combine times. In parallel, a bracket-elimination format, Shiffrin took seven runs last year (each run about half the time as a typical slalom) en route to winning in St. Moritz.
Later in the season, and again before this season, Shiffrin mentioned back soreness that is common in ski racing.
“So it’s just a little bit like what’s my body going to allow me to do as well,” she said in Cotober. “I know I’m only 24, but at the same time I sort of feel like I’m already 24 [laughs], and I feel it.”
Shiffrin, while adding more and more downhills and super-Gs, has skipped just two technical races since bursting on the World Cup scene in 2012 at age 15. Those were in city events, also bracket formats.
She passed on one in Stockholm in 2016, when she was coming back from a two-month knee-injury absence and had no chance of winning the season title in slalom. She skipped Stockholm again in late January 2018, prioritizing preparing for the PyeongChang Olympics.
In other winter sports events this weekend, the men’s Alpine World Cup heads to Val d’Isere, France, for a Saturday slalom (7 a.m., Olympic Channel and NBC Sports Gold) and Sunday giant slalom (6:30 a.m., Olympic Channel and NBC Sports Gold). Last Sunday, Tommy Ford ended the U.S. men’s longest victory and podium droughts in two decades.
In hockey, the Olympic and world champion U.S. women face Canada in an exhibition in Hartford on Saturday at 7 p.m. ET on NBCSN.
Freestyle skiers and snowboarders compete at the U.S. Grand Prix at Copper Mountain, Colo., on Friday (1:30 p.m. ET, NBCSN) and Saturday (2:30 p.m., NBCSN).
A full list of Olympic sports events airing this weekend can be found here.
OlympicTalk is on Apple News. Favorite us!