Mikaela Shiffrin has won her 100th World Cup victory. On Sunday in Sestriere, Italy, Shiffrin beat her talented Croatian opponent, Zrinka Ljutic, by 61 hundredths of a second for gold. Jason Gay reports in The Wall Street Journal:
She chases no one anymore. She carves her own line, and she has for a good, long while.
On Sunday in Sestriere, Italy, the U.S. alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin claimed a historic World Cup victory—the 100th in her extraordinary, unprecedented career. A couple of years back, Shiffrin toppled Ingemar Stenmark’s alpine record of 86 World Cup wins, and the 29-year-old has added plenty of distance since.
One hundred wins is an outrageous mark, once thought unreachable. Shiffrin claimed she hadn’t mulled the possibility until she arrived at its doorstep.
“Too big,” she told Eurosport at the finish line Sunday. “It’s too long. It takes too much.”
By now Shiffrin knew: nothing about this was easy. Shiffrin’s ski career may at first have seemed impossibly charmed—a Colorado comet, sharpened on Vermont ice, breaking through as an Olympic gold medalist at 18—but her evolution into skiing legend has proven to be arduous, even brutal.
Watch the story of Shiffrin’s race to 100 here:
