Mikaela Shiffrin is not quitting slalom. She is refusing to live inside it. On Tuesday, the three-time Olympic champion said she will race less of her signature event this winter and build the season around giant slalom and super-G instead. She called the campaign an exploration. The first slalom on the calendar, she said, is Killington.
“I’m planning to race less slalom this season. Not necessarily no slalom,” Shiffrin said. “Right now, the plan is Killington as my first slalom and potentially a few others throughout the season.”
The timing is the story. Shiffrin, 31, just came off a year in which she won nine of ten World Cup slaloms, a ninth slalom crystal globe, and a second Olympic slalom gold at Milano Cortina. That Cortina win, on February 18, ended an eight-year medal drought and gave her a third Olympic title, after Sochi in 2014 and the giant slalom in PyeongChang in 2018. Of her 110 World Cup victories, 73 have come in slalom. No one in the modern era has owned a discipline more completely.
So she is stepping away from the sure thing.
She will skip the season’s first two slaloms. The winter opens with a giant slalom in Sölden, Austria, on October 24. Killington, over Thanksgiving weekend in Vermont, is the planned first return to the gates she has ruled for most of the past 14 seasons. After that, a few more starts, enough to protect her place among the top starters, and then room to train differently.
“I’ll have the chance to recover, train differently, take care of my body differently, and build more intentional GS and super-G blocks,” she said.
The curiosity, she added, has moved. “Right now, I feel that curiosity with giant slalom and super-G. This season is an exploration.” In a separate statement she put the motive more bluntly: she is not doing less because she cares less. She is doing something different because she still cares. “The joy for me has never been about medals or records.”
The record book makes the shift look almost unreasonable. Shiffrin has won the overall World Cup title six times, most recently by 87 points. She has a super-G globe from 2019 and a World Cup super-G win as recently as December 2022, but last season she finished fourth in giant slalom and outside the top 30 in super-G. The exploration is not a victory lap. It is a bet that the fastest skier in slalom history still has unfinished business on longer skis.
Beijing is part of the backdrop, even if she did not center it on Tuesday. In 2022 she left the Games without a medal after failing to finish her main events. Cortina closed that chapter. What comes after a chapter that took more than two decades to write is the question she is answering by racing less of the event that made her.
Killington will still matter. A Shiffrin slalom start, even a rare one, resets the field. The difference this winter is that it will not be the whole winter. The woman who turned slalom into a private property is spending the season somewhere else on the mountain, on purpose.
