Mikaela Shiffrin won her Milestone 100th alpine ski race on Sunday, just weeks after returning from a major injury.
Her record -breaking victory came in slalom, 61 hundreds of a second over Zrinka Ljutic from Crotia in Sestriere, Italy. Paula Moltzan from Minnesota took third.
“My feeling is empty a little,” Shiffrin told reporters after the race. “It’s overwhelming. It’s too hard to find thoughts for it. But it’s also a very quiet moment because I normally just think. So sometimes it’s nice to have a moment where I can’t think.”
Shiffrin, 29, won in just her sixth race since she returned after a crash on November 30 in a giant slalom driving in Killington, Vt., Which left her with a stab wound in her oblique muscle that required surgery.
“I’ve been wondering in recent weeks so many times if it’s the right thing to come back,” she said. “We did not take the simple way, it is safe, but in the end, to continue to move on and to end this recovery, I have to be in the start gate, and I have to experience these feelings when they are good and when they are bad .
On Sunday, Shiffin built a lead of nine hundreds of seconds over Ljutic after the first run. In the second driving she ran the fourth fastest, and the combined times were good enough to win No. 100.
“It’s a little moment in the middle of many tough moments that make me feel that I might be good again,” she said.
In March 2023, Shiffrin broke nothing Stenmark’s alpine record of 86 World Cup victories.
-Field level media
