Mikaela Shiffrin, who has the potential to win 100 World Cups in her lifetime, is making a few modest changes to her race strategy for the next season.
Shiffrin chose to concentrate her offseason training on slalom, giant slalom, and super-G after winning nine races in the previous season to raise her record to 97 Alpine skiing World Cup victories.
This season, which starts on October 26 with a GS in Sölden, Austria, she has no intention of competing in any downhill races.
After competing in both slalom and giant slalom at the 2011 World Cup, Shiffrin, 29, is a seasoned competitor. Beginning in 2015, she began to add some super-Gs and downhills, carefully selecting which of those speed races to compete in over the previous ten years so as not to interfere with her GS and slalom. All nine of the previous seasons—aside from 2020–21—she competed in at least one downhill race.
She trained very well for downhill skiing in the summer of 2023, but she did not train much for her main events, giant slalom and slalom, and none at all for super-G because of the bad weather.
On December 9, she won the first downhill of the season, and then she concentrated on the last three.
Her second downhill racing week of the season in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, in late January was the last time she touched her downhill skis. And on that second downhill, she went down. She missed eleven races because to a sprained left leg ligament.
Shiffrin remarked, “I kind of didn’t have enough preparation prior to Cortina to really ski the way I wanted to ski.”
After making a comeback in March, she won her next two races, both slaloms, and finished the season ahead of all women with nine victories.
“Obviously, after my crash, we kind of thought about what would be the best way for me to train and get ready for these races.” said she. “I would prefer to be racing at a faster pace.
“We are trying, but it’s kind of physically impossible for you to get the preparation to be in winning shape in every event,” my team said to me when I spoke with them last year. You’re always sacrificing something since you’re not training at the same locations for tech (GS and slalom) as you are for speed (downhill and super-G), and the current weather patterns make it extremely difficult to arrange where to go.
We then had the notion to try to target super-G because going downhill just takes a very long time. With training runs, a race takes three to four days to complete.
She praised Kilde’s “amazing mentality and patience with the process,” adding that he was wrapping up an eight-week online course in real estate and economics. He takes care of things. He accepts it with grace. He approaches things piecemeal. He looks for activities that assist him in establishing structure.
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