No. 100 will have to wait for Mikaela Shiffrin.
Shiffrin will miss Sunday’s slalom in Killington, Vermont, after a hard crash during the second run of the giant slalom on Saturday. She was taken off the hill on a sled, though said a few hours later that there was ‘not really too much cause for concern.’
‘I just can’t move. I have a pretty good abrasion. And something stabbed me,’ she said, panning to a wound above her hip in a video she posted to social media. ‘So I just can’t move. I’m so sorry to scare everybody. It looks like all scans so far are clear.’
Shiffrin wished her U.S. teammates luck in Sunday’s slalom and said she’ll be ‘cheering from the sidelines on this one.’ Shiffrin has won the slalom title six times at Killington. She’s also won the first two slalom races of the season.
The giant slalom was Shiffrin’s first chance to get her 100th World Cup victory, extending her own record. Though she’d never won the GS at Killington, she seemed poised to do it Saturday with a comfortable lead heading into the second run.
But with shadows lengthening on an already icy course, Shiffrin appeared to get off-balance and lose her edge as she took a tight line around a gate less than 15 seconds from the finish line. She fell over and slid sideways, hitting one gate and somersaulting into another before slamming into the safety netting on the side of the hill.
She stayed down for several minutes as safety personnel immediately rushed to her side and the crowd grew silent. Killington is only a two-hour drive from the Burke Mountain Academy, where Shiffrin and many other top U.S. skiers train as teenagers, and the crowd is always a raucous one for U.S. skiers.
The crash put a damper on what was an otherwise stellar day for the Americans. The other four U.S. women all made the second run, and Paula Moltzan and Nina O’Brien finished fifth and sixth, respectively.
‘Thank you for the support and the concern,’ Shiffrin said in her video. ‘And congratulations to the winners and to my teammates for incredible performances.’
It’s only the eighth time in Shiffrin’s World Cup career, and first since 2018, that she hasn’t finished a giant slalom race, and it brought a shocking end to a day that began with such promise.
Shiffrin finished the first run more than three-tenths of a second ahead of Sara Hector of Sweden. While some of the other top contenders got tripped up by the icy terrain, Shiffrin said after the first run that she found the surface to be ‘really great.’
‘The course and the conditions are really spectacular,’ she said between runs. ‘It’s pretty straightforward. There may be some spots on the hill with a few stones that are surfacing as people ski. Some of the skiers, they look fine, and then their ski slips out.
‘I don’t think it’s an issue of not enough grip so much as you hit a stone and you lose the edge,’ she added. ‘It’s pretty typical for this race here.’
