In Olympic sports over the weekend, Mikaela Shiffrin rallied from fourth place after the first run for a sixth consecutive World Cup slalom win dating back to last season and record-extending 106th career World Cup victory in Semmering, Austria, on Sunday.
Shiffrin trailed first-run leader Camille Rast of Switzerland by 54 hundredths of a second, then had the fastest second run and overtook Rast by nine hundredths combining times from both runs. Shiffrin said afterward that the deteriorating course “was not safe” for the field – 39 of the 79 starters did not finish the first run.
It’s the third time over Shiffrin’s record 69 World Cup slalom wins that she rallied to win from outside the top three after the first run. It’s her largest deficit overcome to win a slalom since 2022 (not counting DNFs from the first-run leader).
Shiffrin is now one shy of the longest slalom win streak of her career (seven in 2016 and in 2018-19). She can match her longest streak this Sunday – the next World Cup races are a giant slalom on Saturday and then a slalom in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia.
Also over the weekend, Shiffrin placed sixth in Saturday’s giant slalom in Semmering. Shiffrin has called her GS skiing “a work in progress” this season with finishes of fourth, 14th, sixth, tied for fourth and sixth. She punctured oblique muscles in a November 2024 GS crash, was sidelined two months and then was diagnosed in February with post-traumatic stress disorder as she trained to return to the event. Austrian Julia Scheib won Saturday for her third victory in five GS races this season.
Jessie Diggins leads the Tour de Ski – a Tour de France-like stage competition that is made up of World Cup races – through two of six stages after finishing fourth in Sunday’s opening sprint and third in Monday’s 10km.
Diggins is the lone North American woman or man to win a Tour de Ski, doing so in 2020-21 and 2023-24. Diggins, an Olympic medalist of every color who announced this will be her last season before retirement, also leads the World Cup overall standings through 10 races.
The Tour de Ski resumes Wednesday and runs through Sunday.
Jutta Leerdam was the biggest story over the first three days of the Olympic speed skating trials in the Netherlands, the sport’s leading nation.
Leerdam, the 2022 Olympic 1000m silver medalist who has 4.8 million Instagram followers and is engaged to boxer Jake Paul, fell and did not finish her 1000m race on Friday.
Then on Sunday, she finished second in the 500m, which will very likely be enough to get her on the Olympic team in the 500m and possibly in the 1000m, too.
Leerdam’s place in both events is not guaranteed yet. Similar to U.S. Olympic trials in swimming, enough athletes have to make the team in multiple events to lift all of the runners-up at trials onto the team without going over the maximum overall roster size of nine skaters per gender.
With multi-event stars like Femke Kok (who already won the 500m and 1000m) and Joy Beune (world champion in 1500m and 3000m), it is expected that there will be enough doubles once trials end Tuesday for Leerdam to make the team in the 500m.
If Leerdam makes the team in the 500m, her path to skating the 1000m, her primary event, in Milan becomes more possible despite her fall and DNF at trials. That’s because the Netherlands can enter three women in the 1000m at the Olympics, but it’s possible the nation will not take the third-place finisher in the 1000m from trials (Naomi Verkerk) because of that overall roster limit and because Verkerk didn’t finish in the top three in her other event, the 500m. That scenario would open a spot in the Olympic 1000m that Leerdam could fill.
In another possible pathway, Dutch media reported that the selection criteria allows for discretion to replace a top-three skater with another one who doesn’t place in the top three at trials. Leerdam could make a strong case given she won two of the four World Cup 1000m races so far this season.
Austrian Marco Schwarz won the lone men’s alpine World Cup race over the weekend, Saturday’s super-G in Livigno, Italy, the site of freestyle skiing and snowboarding at the Milan Cortina Games.
Schwarz, 30, is having a resurgent season, nearly two years after seriously injuring his right knee in a downhill crash at the 2026 Olympic site of Bormio and then having unrelated back surgery in summer 2024. This season, Schwarz also won a giant slalom on Dec. 21 and ranks a distant second in the World Cup overall standings behind Swiss Marco Odermatt.
Odermatt was fourth in Saturday’s super-G but retained his place as the world’s highest-ranked super-G skier this season. He could enter the Olympics as the favorite in the downhill, super-G and giant slalom.
The top Americans in Livigno were 2022 Olympic silver medalist Ryan Cochran-Siegle and 2022 Olympian River Radamus in 13th and 14th.
