Mikaela Shiffrin, fresh off a successful world championships, returns to racing this weekend, one victory shy of the career Alpine skiing World Cup wins record of 86, one of the greatest records in the sport.
In Kvitfjell, Norway, Shiffrin is expected to race a super-G on Friday, a downhill on Saturday and another super-G on Sunday. Skiandsnowboard.live streams the action.
In all, there are nine women’s World Cup races left this season. Kvitfjell is followed by a giant slalom and slalom in Åre, Sweden, from March 10-11 and then the World Cup Finals in Andorra from March 15-19, which include a downhill, super-G, slalom and giant slalom.
An up-to-date World Cup broadcast schedule is here, including live coverage of men’s races this weekend in Aspen, Colorado, on CNBC, NBCSports.com/live, the NBC Sports app and Peacock.
Shiffrin’s best events are slalom and GS. But she also has recent success in super-G and downhill, making it possible that she can match Swede Ingemar Stenmark‘s wins record this weekend. Stenmark, a Swedish slalom and GS star of the 1970s and ‘80s, has held the record since January 1982.
Stenmark has repeated in interviews that he believes the 27-year-old Shiffrin will eventually win at least 100 World Cup races. Shiffrin reciprocated the praise.
“I would say the name means more than the number [86],” she said of Stenmark in January. “His name is in history as a legend of the sport that people will remember forever. Maybe they’ll remember him longer than they will remember me, and that’s because we still do [talk about Stenmark]. ... That’s a pretty incredible mark to leave on the sport.”
On Wednesday, Shiffrin posted the fastest run in downhill training, though many skiers save their top speeds for race day. Italian Sofia Goggia, the world’s top-ranked downhiller (by a wide margin), slowed considerably near the end of the course.
In her most recent races, Shiffrin won one gold medal and two silvers in four starts at February’s world championships, giving her 14 world medals in 17 career individual races, the most by any Alpine skier since World War II.
Back in October, before this season began, Shiffrin called the pursuit of Stenmark’s record “a large mountain to climb.” At the time, she was 12 wins shy of the record (and eight wins shy of Lindsey Vonn‘s female record).
She has since won 11 times in 23 World Cup starts, showcasing what she called, at times, the best skiing of her career to rack up her most wins in a single season since her record 17-victory campaign in 2018-19.
Shiffrin has been so dominant that a secondary storyline is in play this weekend. Shiffrin can clinch this season’s World Cup overall title, the biggest annual prize in ski racing, as early as Friday’s super-G.
Often, the overall is not clinched until the World Cup Finals, but Shiffrin’s standings lead (counting results from every World Cup race) is greater than the margin separating second place from 26th place.
Shiffrin is on the verge of her fifth World Cup overall title, which would break her tie with Vonn for second on the women’s all-time list behind Austrian Annemarie Moser-Pröll, who won six in the 1970s.
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