Mikaela Shiffrin placed fourth in a World Cup super-G on Friday, her first race since the world championships ended two weeks ago, and remains one shy of the career World Cup wins record of 86.
Cornelia Huetter won in Kvitfjell, Norway, by one hundredth of a second over Italian Elena Curtoni.
Swiss Lara Gut-Behrami was third, followed by Shiffrin, who was 16 hundredths behind Huetter, who became the first Austrian woman to win a race this season.
“I felt very good with my skiing,” Shiffrin told Austrian broadcaster ORF. “Obviously it’s quite tight, so I’ll just see if I can maybe get a little bit more [for the next race] but not go overboard.”
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Shiffrin has 85 World Cup wins, one shy of the record held by Swede Ingemar Stenmark, a slalom and giant slalom star of the 1970s and ‘80s.
She races again in a downhill on Saturday and a super-G on Sunday. The following weekend, the World Cup visits Sweden for her best events of slalom and GS.
“There’s so much talk about the record, and if it happens today or tomorrow or the next day,” Shiffrin said. “I kind of have the perspective that it might not even happen this season.”
Shiffrin can also this weekend clinch the World Cup overall title, the biggest annual prize in ski racing, which is awarded to the top Alpine skier tabulating results over the entire season.
With 11 wins this season, Shiffrin leads the standings by 761 points over Gut-Behrami with eight races to go.
A race winner receives 100 points on a descending scale through the 30th-place finisher, so Shiffrin will mathematically clinch her fifth overall title if she is more than 700 points ahead of Gut-Behrami after Saturday’s downhill.
A fifth overall title would break her tie with Lindsey 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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