US ski star Shiffrin to skip downhills in upcoming season as she nears milestone of 100 career wins

SALZBURG, Austria (AP) — American ski star Mikaela Shiffrin won’t race downhills in the upcoming World Cup season in which she aims for her 100th career win.

The record holder since surpassing Swedish great Ingemar Stenmark’s tally of 86 World Cup wins in March 2023, Shiffrin stands at 97 and is close to the milestone that was long deemed unreachable.

Following the worst crash of her career in January, the two-time Olympic champion even considered not racing at all – but only briefly.

“Then you wake up the next morning and you go out on the slopes, and you think ‘I’m motivated, like, I want to be here,’” Shiffrin told The Associated Press at a recent media event of her equipment supplier Atomic in Austria.

In the aftermath of the downhill crash that kept her off the slopes for six weeks — and cost her a record-equaling sixth overall title she was favored to take — Shiffrin has decided to drop the sport’s fastest and most dangerous discipline from her schedule.

“No downhill, not this season. I would love to bring it back, but we’ll see how it goes,” Shiffrin said.

Shiffrin will fully focus on slalom, GS and super-G when the new campaign gets underway with a giant slalom in Soelden, Austria on Oct. 26.

The season also includes world championships in Austria in February.

Shiffrin won nine races last season, even when missing six weeks of racing.

The American sprained the MCL and tibiofibular ligament in her left knee during a full-speed crash into the safety nets on the 2026 Olympic course in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.

She was among a slew of World Cup, Olympic and world champions to crash hard in a packed January program, including her fiancé Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, who had urgent surgery to repair a severe cut and nerve damage in his right calf, plus two torn ligaments in his right shoulder after a terrifying crash near the finish of the downhill in Wengen, Switzerland, two weeks before Shiffrin’s mishap.

During their recovery processes, Shiffrin and Kilde contemplated retirement.

“We’ve had that conversation. We’ve both had moments where we were like: ‘I’m so tired of it, it’s time,’” Shiffrin said.

“I’m assuming there’s a shift in the mentality from a moment of doubt to like between moments of motivation to more doubt and less motivation. And right now, I’m still pretty much always motivated. But there’s challenges that we face. And his injury... it took a while for him to say he wanted to come back.”

While Shiffrin returned for, and won, two slaloms near the end of last season, Kilde suffered a setback in his recovery as his shoulder needed additional surgery over the summer, leaving his return to World Cup racing open.

Shiffrin, meanwhile, went through her preparation period for the new season, which included a training camp with the U.S. ski team in Chile and more sessions in the gym as usual to rebuild her physical strength after reducing her workload during the injury layoff.

Skipping all eight downhills on the 2024-25 World Cup calendar does not necessarily mean Shiffrin will ski fewer speed events than in previous seasons, as she plans to start in as many of the nine scheduled super-Gs as possible.

For an all-event skier like Shiffrin, there has just been not enough time to accommodate proper training in all disciplines.

“Last season, I felt that my super-G level was not very good. So, all season long we were trying to find a time to train super-G, GS and slalom. And then I didn’t train downhill before Cortina, and then I wasn’t really prepared to do the downhill in Cortina – well, I was prepared, but in a way there was somehow some level missing,” said Shiffrin, who planned “to be more efficient with our training” in the upcoming season.

The first seven races of the season, though, are all technical events, giving the American a reasonable chance to get to 100 career wins even before the speed schedule starts mid-December in Beaver Creek in her native Colorado.

“I don’t personally care about winning 100, but I do think it’s a monumental moment in the sport,” said Shiffrin, adding she’d like to seize the opportunity to promote the sport more than she felt she was doing when breaking Stenmark’s best mark.

“To be honest, with 86, I really wanted to downplay it, I didn’t want the world to think that I cared ... I almost downplayed it so much that I think people didn’t want to talk about it.”

She and her team have already been working on ideas to “make it more meaningful, beyond me and beyond a number” when she gets to 100.

“I get so much from the sport, anyway, and I have been the whole time, whether I get 99 races or a 100 or a 105 or whatever. Like, I’ve still gotten so much from the sport,” Shiffrin said.

“And to be honest, the fact that I’m still doing it feels selfish because what else is there to get? But I still want to be doing it.”

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Eric Willemsen on X: https://x.com/eWilmedia

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AP skiing: https://apnews.com/hub/alpine-skiing