Mikaela Shiffrin plans to race four individual events at the world Alpine skiing championships that start Monday, making it the busiest worlds of her career.
Shiffrin said Tuesday that she eyes the combined on Monday (one run of super-G and one run of slalom), the super-G next Tuesday and the giant slalom (Feb. 18) and slalom (Feb. 20) in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy (full NBC Sports TV schedule here).
Shiffrin, who won the last four slalom world titles, has never raced more than three events at a single Olympics or world championships.
She always races the slalom and GS and started adding speed events in recent years -- the combined at the 2018 Olympics and the super-G at the 2019 Worlds, which she won in a what she called a surprise.
Shiffrin went into this season on less-than-ideal preparation. She recently trained super-G (three days) for the first time in one year.
“I’m really going into this sort of speed section of world champs with the intention of almost trying to take it as an opportunity for training,” she said. “I think that I’ll be able to have a pretty good result, but when you look at what Lara [Gut-Behrami]‘s been able to do the last races [four consecutive super-G wins] and what a lot of the girls are doing, I have absolutely no guarantee that it’s going to stack up.
“I’m not going in to defend my [super-G] title, if that makes sense. I want to be clear about that.”
Shiffrin went 300 days between races following her father’s death last Feb. 2. She returned to the World Cup, after missing time with a back injury, in November and has raced five slaloms and five giant slaloms this season.
Shiffrin won twice, earned two more podiums and ranks third and fifth in the disciplines. She finished sixth, sixth and fourth in her final three races before worlds, all giant slaloms.
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