KETCHUM, Idaho — Mikaela Shiffrin was standing at the start gate before the second run of Thursday’s final World Cup race of the season. The American Alpine skiing great had a strong lead after the first run, but still, she said, the thought crossed her mind that maybe she should just play it safe, employ a “get to the finish” strategy, and not risk pushing too hard for a win that ultimately didn’t mean much.
“And then I heard everybody cheering,” she said of the home-country crowd waiting below, “and I was like, ‘All right. F— it. Let’s go.’”
After all she’s been through this season, it was time to let it rip.
Shiffrin jumped out of the gate and deftly cut through the increasingly slushy course at the Sun Valley Resort, where the adoring crowd could be seen and heard up at the slalom starting gate. She posted the third-best time in the second run to win comfortably at the World Cup finals, put an exclamation point on a “roller coaster” season, and delight a group of young fans who were dressed as Dalmatians to put a Disney theme on their hopes to see Shiffrin claim her 101st World Cup victory.
Shiffrin finished in 1:45.92, 1.13 seconds clear of the closest competitor, Germany’s Lena Duerr. Slovakia’s Andreja Slokar took third, just 0.01 behind Duerr.
Mikaela Shiffrin celebrates her win Thursday in the women’s slalom at the World Cup finals in Ketchum, Idaho. It was the 101st World Cup win of her career. (Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)
Shiffrin concluded the 2024-25 season where she began — atop a World Cup slalom podium — but the months in between were filled with physical and mental recovery after a late-November injury left her with a puncture wound in her abdomen and cost her two months of competition and, ultimately, a shot at the season title.
While she was out, Shiffrin missed four races, and Croatia’s Zrinka Ljutić pounced while the GOAT was away. Ljutić won two of the races Shiffrin missed and also the race in Courchevel, France, in January when Shiffrin returned and finished 10th while still working her way back to form.
The result: Despite Shiffrin winning more slalom races (four) than any other woman this season, the lost points from the races she missed were too much to overcome in the race for the season title. Ljutić won the slalom crystal globe, the trophy given to the individual discipline winners and the overall champion, and sent Shiffrin, who finished fourth in the slalom standings, into an offseason without any translucent hardware for just the fourth time in the last 13 seasons.
An elated Ljutić, who turned 21 in January, had a plan to celebrate.
“I will maybe get drunk for the first time in my life,” she said.
A well-deserved cheers, but there’s little doubt Shiffrin is still the star of slalom. She’s won eight of her last 10 races in the discipline and now has 64 career World Cup slalom wins. Only two others, Lindsey Vonn and Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark, have more World Cup wins total. There will still be a handful of World Cup events next season before the 2026 Olympics begin in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, but as the 2024-25 campaign ends, Shiffrin, despite it all, is the clear favorite in her best discipline.
Wins, puncture wounds, Dalmatians. How does she assess the whole season?
“We could be here for days,” she quipped. “This one has been quite a roller coaster.”
At the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, Shiffrin competed in all six available events — downhill, super-G, giant slalom, slalom, combined and mixed team. She left China with three DNFs and no medals.
In the time since, she’s eased away from the speed events, downhill and super-G. She last raced one of those in January 2024, when she was injured in a downhill crash in Cortina. Last October, she acknowledged that her team has told her it’s “physically impossible” to prepare her for all the different disciplines.
Giant slaloms haven’t been easy lately either. It was that event in Killington, Vt., where Shiffrin fell and suffered the injury that disrupted her season. The aftereffects of the crash have left her struggling to reacclimate to the faster discipline, mentally and physically, and she didn’t have the necessary points to qualify to race in the event in the World Cup finals.
She’d like to reverse her Olympic fortunes next year. And Thursday’s slalom result gave her a springboard into a critical training period.
“Ending the season with this level in slalom gives me a lot of energy going into the preparation time and our next training camps to try to match this level of slalom with where I want to go with (giant slalom),” she said. “It gives me energy to do the work. Feels like there’s a lot of work to do, but this gives me the inspiration to do that.”
That day in Killington was supposed to be her coronation as the first ever Alpine skier with 100 World Cup race victories. The crash changed all that, delaying the celebration for three months.
Mikaela Shiffrin signs autographs Thursday after her win in the final World Cup slalom race of the year at the Sun Valley resort in Ketchum, Idaho. (Zack Pierce / The Athletic)
When she finally notched No. 100, she sounded relieved. Thursday, she sounded ready for the next chapter.
“One-hundred (World Cup wins) was this reset moment,” she said, “and 101 is like a restart almost. There’s plenty of future left in my career, hopefully. … It’s not the end, it’s not the beginning, but it’s somewhere in the beautiful middle.”
When her medal ceremony was over, Shiffrin made her way off the race course. A line of 50 or 60 fans waited along the fence for a chance to say congrats or get an autograph. Shiffrin stopped for all of them, including the girls in Dalmatian outfits, before walking off into the offseason.
The Olympics are less than a year away. Shiffrin looks and sounds ready for the challenge.
“You get a taste of why we train so hard,” she said. “That makes it a little bit easier to dive into the next months with a good attitude.”
(Top photo of Mikaela Shiffrin on the podium after her win Thursday: Christophe Pallot / Agence Zoom / Getty Images)