No one better.
Mikaela Shiffrin surpassed Ingemar Stenmark’s long-standing record for all-time World Cup wins Saturday with her 87th victory. The historic win, in a slalom in Are, Sweden, came just one day after Shiffrin matched the Swedish legend’s record, a mark that had stood for 34 years.
“Pretty hard to comprehend that thought,” Shiffrin said. “Holy crap.”
Just as she did Friday, Shiffrin built a big lead — 0.69 seconds — in the first run, with only two skiers within a second of her. With Wendy Holdener trying to make a charge, Shiffrin needed to be aggressive but controlled in the second run and that’s exactly what she did. She flows through the tightly-spaced gates rather than fighting them, and made a furious push to the finish line.
Shiffrin dropped to a crouch after she crossed the finish and buried her head in her knees, taking a few seconds to let the magnitude of the moment sink in. Other skiers rushed to congratulate her and she was then surprised by her brother, Taylor, who lifted her up in a bear hug. Members of the U.S. team passed around hats with the number 87 emblazoned on them.
“Congratulations to you (for) breaking my record,” Stenmark said in an NBC video. “It was fantastic.”
Dominant, too. Shiffrin finished a whopping 0.92 seconds ahead of Holdener of Switzerland. Sweden’s Anna Swenn Larsson was 0.95 seconds back of Shiffrin.
The win was Shiffrin’s 13th of the season, second only to the record 17 races she won in 2019. She has clinched the overall, slalom and giant slalom season titles, and now has 15 globes for her career.
And the season isn’t done yet. The World Cup Finals are next week in Andorra, and Shiffrin is expected to race in the slalom, giant slalom and super-G.
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Coming full circle
There was poetic symmetry to Shiffrin’s accomplishments this week.
Are is where Shiffrin got her very first World Cup win, in a slalom race back in 2012, and it’s also in Stenmark’s home country. Stenmark’s last World Cup win came in Aspen, Colo., the state where Shiffrin grew up and still makes her off-season home.
Stenmark wasn’t in Are to see his record fall. He makes few public appearances, and told The Associated Press last month that he wanted to be respectful of Sweden’s skiers. Sweden had two women in the top 10 Saturday, and Sara Hector was third in the giant slalom Friday.
But Stenmark followed Shiffrin’s pursuit of his record and counts himself among her fans.
“I think she can win more than 100,” Stenmark told the AP. “It depends on how many years she continues. But for sure 100.”
An unbeatable record falls
When Stenmark retired, his 86 wins seemed like a record that would never be matched. Annemarie Moser-Proell was No. 2 on the list at the time, and she’d won 24 fewer races. Alberto Tomba, Hermann Maier, Marcel Hirscher – none could challenge Stenmark.
Lindsey Vonn came the closest, winning 83 World Cup races before her body broke down and she was forced to retire.
Shiffrin, though, has always been in a different class. She made her World Cup debut at 15 and won her first World Cup race at 17. This is her fourth season with double-digit victories.
While it took Stenmark 15 seasons to amass his 86 wins, Shiffrin has gotten to 87 in 11.
And unlike many skiers, who excel in either the speed or the technical events, Shiffrin has won across every discipline. In addition to her 53 victories in slalom and 20 in giant slalom, she has won five World Cup races in both super-G and parallel, three in downhill and one in Alpine combined.
“I’m also impressed that she can ski good both in slalom and in super-G and downhill also,” Stenmark, whose wins were all in slalom and giant slalom, told the AP. “I could never have been so good in all disciplines.”
Added pressure
As Shiffrin closed in first on Vonn and then on Stenmark, she couldn’t go anywhere without being asked about the records. When was she going to get them? What would they mean?
For someone who has always cared more about the process than the prizes, Shiffrin acknowledged that outsized focus on the records was stressful.
“It’s actually been quite tough to focus the last weeks,” she said Friday. “But today wasn’t so bad. It was like, if it happens, it happens. When it happens.”
Bouncing back
Shiffrin’s historic season comes a year after the low point of her career.
A two-time Olympic champion before her 23rd birthday, Shiffrin was expected to collect a haul of medals at last year’s Beijing Games. Instead, she came home empty-handed, recording DNFs in three of her five individual races.
“I’m not going to fail bigger than that. Probably. And I survived it,” Shiffrin said earlier this year. “I realized that pretty much everything is survivable. Everything that is going to happen in my ski career is fully survivable. No matter what it is, whether it’s great or it’s terrible, it’s just not the end of the world. There’s bigger things that happen in life. And I’ve experienced it.”
She was referring to the sudden death of her father, Jeff, in February 2020. Shiffrin has been open about how unmoored she was by her grief, and she remains surrounded by memories of him. After getting her 85th win in Spindleruv Mlyn in January, she recalled her father being alongside her the first time she went there for what was her first World Cup race.
But she’s finally able to see past her grief, and look forward to other things in her life. And with her 87th win behind her, the weight has been lifted.
“It’s a pretty spectacular position to be in,” Shiffrin said Friday. “I don’t take it for granted to be in this place where people ask me about when I’m going to win 86 or when I’m going to win 87. That’s a pretty cool place to be.”
