Mikaela Shiffrin Wins Gold In Super-G at The World Championships

“It’s been such an insane, amazing season,” she said Monday, when things were not so amazing.

How are the world championships going so far?

Shiffrin got off to a rough start. In the first event, the Alpine combined, which includes one run of super-G followed by one run of slalom, Shiffrin appeared to be headed for a come-from-behind win at the bottom of the slalom hill.

Shiffrin had skied the sixth-fastest super-G run, but that left her 96-hundredths of a second behind the leader, Federica Brignone of Italy, forcing her to ski aggressively during a high-risk, high-reward slalom. She made up time at each split, and the computer simulations projected her taking a lead by as much as three-10ths of a second.

But as she tried to navigate over a rough patch of snow about five gates from the finish, Shiffrin lost her balance and ended up straddling one of the next gates. That disqualified her from the competition. She said Wednesday that she learned in the combined that she was going to have to ski aggressively from the start in the super-G if she wanted to have a chance at the podium.

The bobble had echoes of the series of slips and skids during the Beijing Olympics last year, when Shiffrin failed to finish three individual events and was far off the podium in two others.

Shiffrin knew the questions would be coming.

“I was thinking I was going to go through the mixed zone and everyone is going to ask if this is Beijing again,” she said, but that was the price she knew she might have to pay for the “full-gas skiing” that taking the lead was going to require.

“I’m not afraid of the consequences,” she said.

What’s next?

The downhill is scheduled for Saturday but Shiffrin has a love-sort-of-hate relationship with the event and won’t race. She has three first-place finishes in her career in World Cup downhill races, but she has never won a medal in the Olympics or the world championships in the event.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/sports/skiing/shiffrin-alpine-world-championship.html