Shiffrin flies to skiing’s pinnacle
Mikaela Shiffrin won the overall Alpine skiing World Cup title. Photo Copyright 2017 Carolyn E. Wright
By Bill Pennington, New York Times
ASPEN, Colo. — “Is my career ahead of schedule?” Mikaela Shiffrin, the precocious Olympic and world ski racing champion, asked here on Monday, her 22nd birthday. “No, I don’t think I’ll ever believe I’m ahead of schedule.”
That is truly bad news for the other women’s ski racers of the world.
Shiffrin, before even racing in the finals this weekend, won the women’s World Cup overall title, the sport’s top prize, which is a monumental achievement at any age. Shiffrin had built a nearly insurmountable lead in the season-long World Cup standings, and on Friday, her only remaining competitor, Ilka Stuhec, withdrew from Saturday’s slalom, handing the overall title to Shiffrin, who becomes only the third American woman to win it, and the first since 1983 not named Lindsey Vonn.
On Saturday she was second behind Petra Vlhova in the season’s final slalom race. In some ways it was anticlimactic because Shiffrin had won the slalom globe at Squaw Valley last weekend. On Sunday Shiffrin she will try for the overall giant slalom title, though she is 81 points behind Tessa Worley.
If this isn’t overachieving, what would it look like if she were?
