US ski star Shiffrin wins 2nd straight World Cup slalom of Olympic season

GURGL, Austria (AP) – American ski star Mikaela Shiffrin is heading into her home races in Colorado next weekend as the overall World Cup leader on a two-event winning streak.

Shiffrin dominated another slalom Sunday as she made it two convincing wins from two races in the discipline to start the Olympic season.

Racing in sunny but cold conditions in the Austrian Alps, Shiffrin posted the fastest time in both runs to finish 1.23 seconds ahead of second-placed Lara Colturi, an Italian prodigy competing for Albania.

The pair also went 1-2 in the first slalom of the season a week ago in Finland, where Shiffrin also led both runs and won by 1.66.

“I think it’s some of the best slalom skiing I ever did,” said Shiffrin, who got her 66th World Cup win in slalom and 103rd overall, both are records.

Slalom world champion Camille Rast trailed by 1.41 in third, as the podium resembled the one from last year’s race in Gurgl. Her Swiss teammate Wendy Holdener dropped to fourth.

Shiffrin’s next races are a giant slalom on Saturday and a slalom the following day in Copper Mountain, the regular training base of the U.S. ski team.

The women’s races follow two men’s events in Copper Mountain on Thursday and Friday.

“I am really excited to go to Copper. I mean, I stay in my own bed for the first time during the season since we used to go to Aspen,” Shiffrin said.

On Sunday, Shiffrin led Colturi by 0.31 after a tight opening run, but used an all-attacking final leg to make the gap four times as big.

“I had to push so hard, but it was really nice with the sun on the second run,” Shiffrin said. “It was pretty much how I expected it, not easy, but I knew the others were pushing, so I had no choice. You have to go.”

Shiffrin and Colturi now rank 1-2 in both the slalom and overall standings after three events. Shiffrin’s teammate Paula Moltzan stood third after she finished Sunday’s race in fifth place.

Moltzan was second and Shiffrin fourth in the season-opening giant slalom in October, which was won by Austrian skier Julia Scheib.

Shiffrin also won the season’s first two slaloms in Levi and Gurgl last year, but then had a frightening crash in a GS when chasing career win 100 in Killington, Vermont in November.

She returned two months later and won two more slaloms, but announced before the current season she planned to reduce her schedule to slalom and GS, and maybe super-G, heading into the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics in February.

“I was so focused on giant slalom over the prep period, trying to get my level back to something worthy in GS races. So, I didn’t get a lot of slalom training, but I got good slalom training,” said Shiffrin, who won Olympic gold in slalom in 2014 and in GS four years later.

With 2022 Olympic champion Petra Vlhova still recovering from the lingering knee injury she sustained in January 2024, Colturi has developed into Shiffrin’s main rival in slalom.

“It’s just amazing to come back here to the podium,” Colturi said. “I was feeling not that good during my runs because this kind of conditions for me are not the best things.”

Born in Italy, Colturi was 16 when she made her World Cup debut for Albania three years ago. She won the junior world title in super-G in January 2023, but had her rise halted after tearing the ACL in her right knee in a training crash the following month.

Colturi got her first career podium in Gurgl last year and went on to earn three more top-three results to finish eighth in the overall standings, before adding two second places this month.

“She is just amazing,” Colturi said about Shiffrin. “Our goals, from me and all the others, is just to ski like her, to be perfect like her. But it’s really difficult.”