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Mikaela Shiffrin finished the slalom season Tuesday with a ninth win in 10 World Cup races, resetting her own wins record for a single year and putting her on the brink of winning the crystal globe as the overall champion.The American Alpine skiing star topped the field again at the World Cup finals in Lillehammer, Norway, following a familiar pattern — jumping out to such a lead after the first run that the slope and the gates were the only real threat in the second run.
Leading by more than a second after the opening leg, Shiffrin only extended her lead in the second, finishing two crisp runs in 2 minutes, 7.61 seconds to win by a gaping 1.32 seconds over Switzerland’s Wendy Holdener.
Germany’s all-around rising star, 22-year-old Emma Aicher, finished third, 1.36 seconds back, which was just enough to keep Shiffrin from clinching the overall globe ahead of Wednesday’s final women’s race, the giant slalom. Trailing Shiffrin by 85 points, Aicher would need to win it and have Shiffrin do no better than 17th place. Aicher’s best giant slalom finish so far this season is fourth.
Shiffrin, 31, has won the overall crystal globe five times, from 2017-2019 and 2022-2023. She has 110 career World Cup wins, an all-time record. She had long ago clinched the slalom title and was presented with the crystal globe — the award given to each discipline winner and the overall champion — after Tuesday’s race.
The overall award, which includes points from all races in the season, often goes to skiers like Aicher who excel across at least three of the four individual disciplines in Alpine skiing — downhill, super-G, giant slalom and slalom. Shiffrin, though, is poised to win it on the strength of a historically good slalom season. Along with her nine wins this winter, she finished second in the other race. Her points from slalom alone were better than all but two other skiers entering the World Cup finals.
The globe would cap a triumphant season for Shiffrin, who also won Olympic gold in the slalom in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, after missing the podium in all six events at the 2022 Beijing Games.
Once an all-discipline skier herself, Shiffrin has focused on her specialty technical events in recent years. In November 2024, a crash in a giant slalom in Killington, Vt., left her with a puncture wound in her abdomen and a two-month recovery. When she returned to the slopes in January 2025, her slalom form quickly followed. She won twice in that discipline before the season was over, including at the year-end World Cup finals in Sun Valley, Idaho — which started a run of what’s now 10 slalom wins in 11 World Cup races.
Giant slalom, though, remained a struggle. She withdrew from that event at last year’s world championships, citing post-traumatic stress symptoms in the wake of her crash. In three attempts at the discipline before the 2025 season ended, her best finish was 25th.
This year has seen her get close to the form that has netted her 22 career giant slalom titles. In 10 races, she’s been in the top six eight times. In January, she made her first giant slalom podium in two years.
That performance had her in fourth place in the giant slalom standings entering the World Cup finals. Her 398 points from the discipline added to her 980 slalom points have her in position to beat out Aicher, who has more than 300 in three disciplines but tops out at 453 in the downhill.
Wednesday’s giant slalom runs are scheduled for 4:30 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. ET.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Olympics, Global Sports, Women's Olympics
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