Mikaela Shiffrin earned her 101st World Cup win Thursday, taking the last race of a season that was so challenging that she for a time wondered whether she should still be ski racing.
Shiffrin won the World Cup Finals slalom by 1.13 seconds over German Lena Dürr combining times from two runs in Sun Valley, Idaho, on Thursday.
"(Win No. 100 on Feb. 23) was like this reset moment, and 101 is like a restart almost,” said Shiffrin, looking ahead to the 2025-26 Olympic season that begins in October. “That’s the way I’m trying to see it. There’s plenty of future left in my career, hopefully.”
It’s Shiffrin’s fourth victory in six World Cup slalom starts this season. This was her largest winning margin of those four.
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She won the season’s first two slaloms in November, then tore oblique muscles in a Nov. 30 giant slalom crash. A puncture wound nearly pierced organs.
Shiffrin returned to competition Jan. 30, placing 10th in a slalom. She crashed in training multiple times just before February’s World Championships, including hitting her head “pretty hard” and clearing concussion protocol.
Shiffrin was fifth in the slalom at worlds, where she also won team combined gold with Breezy Johnson. She then placed first, third and first in the last three World Cup slaloms this season, re-establishing herself as the world’s best in the event after being sidelined.
“This (season) has been quite a roller coaster,” she said. “There’s been some really thrilling moments and some moments where I question if I should even be in the sport.”
Shiffrin was affected psychologically by the Nov. 30 crash even after she returned to racing. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder on Feb. 12, sharing more on her YouTube series “Moving Right Along.”
“I know that if I keep putting in the work, even on the hard days, I will get back to feeling myself,” she said in an episode published Wednesday. “But you have to start somewhere, and for me, returning to racing this season is just the start.”
Croatian Zrinka Ljutic won the World Cup slalom season title, largely because Shiffrin missed four of the 10 races.
Slovakia’s Petra Vlhova, the 2022 Olympic slalom champion and Shiffrin’s longtime rival, missed the entire 2024-25 season. Vlhova has been out since tearing at least one right knee ligament in a Jan. 20, 2024 race crash and then undergoing surgery.
Shiffrin’s focus next season will also be on giant slalom, her Olympic gold medal event from 2018. She didn’t race the GS at February’s worlds while still dealing with “mental obstacles” specific to the event returning from the Nov. 30 GS crash.
In three World Cup GS races after worlds, she placed 25th (Feb. 21), then didn’t make the top 30 for a second run (Feb. 22) and skied out of her first run (March 8).
“To try to match this level of slalom with where I want to go with GS, it gives me energy to do the work,” she said of Thursday’s victory. “It feels like there’s a lot of work to do, but this gives me the inspiration to do that.”
World Cup Finals highlights air Saturday at 2 p.m. ET on NBC and Peacock.
