Mikaela Shiffrin opened the World Cup season the way only she can: by putting herself at the front of the pack and making the entire field feel her presence, even if the final result didn’t match the first-run statement.
On the Rettenbach glacier in Sölden, Austria, Shiffrin blitzed the opening giant slalom run in 1:07.27, taking the lead over Sara Hector and Camille Rast. In foggy conditions on the second run she slid wide on a turn and slipped to seventh, 0.83 seconds behind teammate Paula Moltzan, who claimed her first career World Cup win. The result was secondary to the message: the greatest skier of her generation is back on snow and still operating on a different level.
Shiffrin finishes giant slalom in 7th place as ski racing season starts in Austria | VailDaily.com
This is Shiffrin’s self-declared “exploration season.” After winning nine of ten World Cup slaloms last winter, claiming Olympic slalom gold, and securing a record-tying sixth overall World Cup title, she is deliberately racing fewer slaloms. The plan is to pour more training time into giant slalom and super-G, the disciplines where she still feels curiosity and room to grow. She has already skipped the early slaloms in Levi and Gurgl, with her first slalom of the season set for Killington in late November. As she put it, she is not doing less because she cares less; she is doing something different because she still cares so much.
Leading the season opener in a discipline that has not been her primary focus for years is pure Shiffrin. She has more World Cup victories than any skier in history and has rewritten the record books in slalom. Treating early races as high-intensity training sessions while still putting herself in the lead is exactly why peers and fans keep calling her the GOAT. The second-run mistake changes nothing about the larger picture: when Mikaela Shiffrin points her skis downhill, the sport still revolves around her.
Moltzan’s breakthrough win was a feel-good story for the American team, but the lasting image from Sölden is Shiffrin at the front after run one, already showing the ski world what “exploration” looks like when the greatest is doing the exploring.
