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Mikaela Shiffrin, 23 accomplished the first World Cup super-G victory of her career on Sunday. With a time of one minute 19.41 seconds, Shiffrin was the only woman to ski under 80 seconds in Lake Louise, Alta.
“It’s one of my goals to get to a point where I could win any event since I started racing World Cups since I was a little girl really,” Shiffrin said. “To be here today and to be able to ski the way I wanted to and really aggressively, it’s just a really incredible moment.”
The 23-year-old American was over three-quarters of a second faster than runner-up Ragnhild Mowinckel of Norway. Viktoria Rebensburg of Germany was third in 1:20.24. With a pair of slalom wins and now a super-G victory to start this season, Shiffrin has opened a strong defense of her overall World Cup title.
Shiffrin became the first ski racer ever, male or female, to win in all six World Cup disciplines – slalom, parallel slalom, combined, giant slalom, super-G, and downhill. With her 46th career World Cup victory – and her first super-G World Cup win – she moved into a fourth-place tie with Austria’s Renate Götschl on the all-time women’s World Cup win list. Only teammate Lindsey Vonn with 82 victories, Austria’s Annemarie Moser-Pröll with 62, and Switzerland’s Vreni Schneider with 55 are ahead of her on the all-time victory list.
“It was one of my big goals to win in every discipline when I first started racing…one of those goals that you don’t think you’re ever going to achieve, and it’s incredible,” Shiffrin said. “This season I’m still going to race just some super-Gs, but here in Lake Louise, I have a really good feeling. I have to be in the right mindset, so I plan to ski the super-G in St. Moritz (Switzerland), but then it’s up in the air.”
The women’s speed season opened without reigning Olympic downhill champ Sofia Goggia of Italy and Lindsey Vonn, who are both injured. Vonn, the winningest woman in Lake Louise with 18 career victories, intended to make this 2018-19 season her farewell tour. But she wants to race on her favorite mountain one more time, so announced she’ll return to Lake Louise in December of 2019 to compete in one last set of World Cup speed races.
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Super-G is shorter than downhill with gates set wide to test a skier’s ability to carry speed through turns. The racers get a pre-race inspection of the course, but no training runs as they do for downhill.
The women head back to Europe to St. Moritz, Switzerland for World Cup for slalom, super-G and parallel slalom races Saturday and Sunday.
