When Mikaela Shiffrin wins a race, she usually lets the event sink in for the first time. Joy comes with a delay. Maybe because she has won so many times that every triumph has to be classified first. When she fell in the snow after her victory in the giant slalom at the Alpine World Ski Championships in Meribel on Thursday and stood with her hands in front of her face for a few seconds, there was probably not much to classify. She was “proud and happy” at that moment, Shiffrin later said. But it also looked a bit like relief. “I’m doing giant slalom better than ever this season, but I was afraid of screwing it up.”
After five victories in this discipline, the 27-year-old American started as the top favorite in the penultimate women’s competition of the title fights. She knows the role, she has often lived up to it in her career, sometimes not. The fact that Shiffrin had now won gold after losing the combination and silver in the Super-G is a sporting confirmation for her, for her extraordinary season. “It’s incredible, I was super nervous,” she admitted. Italian Federica Brignone distanced her by twelve hundredths of a second. Third was Ragnhild Mowinckel from Norway.
