On Feb. 23, American Alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin won her 100th World Cup in Sestriere, Italy. Shiffrin finished 0.61 seconds before Croatian skier Zrinka Ljutic.
At 29, Shiffrin has been Alpine skiing’s all-time leader in wins for two years for both men and women. For her first 12 years of competing on the FIS World Cup circuit, Shiffrin stayed mostly injury free — with the exception of her two crashes in January 2024 where she missed 11 subsequent races due to a sprain in her left leg ligaments — which helped her stay successful when she was active skiing.
More recently, Shiffrin was absent from competition for two months following a crash on Nov. 30 in Killington, Vt. Shiffrin sustained a puncture wound that tore her oblique muscles and nearly pierced her organs. She also suffered PTSD from the accident, reported BBC.
“From the outside you look fine, you’re back skiing again — but you’re not OK yet,” Shiffrin told BBC.
“Sometimes I’ll get a random vision of crashing. It might not be the Killington crash, it could be the course in front of me, that I have this random vision that I’m in the nets again and something else is stabbing through me,” she added.
After recovering, Shiffrin returned to skiing in January and won three of the five slalom events she competed in. On March 9, she placed third in the slalom in Are, Sweden, breaking the record for most podiums previously held by Ingemar Stenmark.
The only other slalom event she did not win was the first event she competed in after returning from her injury in January, and Shiffrin finished in 10th place in France.
Shiffrin is originally from Vail, Colorado and grew up skiing locally. Both of her parents were skiers, and she started to race when she was eight years old. At 15, Shiffrin qualified for a racing series in Canada and the United States called the Nor-Am Cup circuit, a race for young skiers who want to compete in the World Cup. Between December of 2010 and January of 2011, Shiffrin won four races in the Nor-Am Cup circuit.
In February of 2011, she went to the junior championships and won a bronze medal. In March of 2011, Shiffrin made her World Cup debut in the Czech Republic two days before her sixteenth birthday.
In 2012, Shiffrin won her first World Cup slalom race in Åre, Sweden, just a year and a half after her debut. Shiffrin became the second youngest American female to win a World Cup race.
Continuing from 2013-2014 and 2014-2015, Shiffrin held the title of the World Cup champion in slalom.
Shiffrin has competed in three Olympic Winter Games and earned three Olympic medals, two of which are gold. She won her first gold medal at 18 years old in 2014 in Sochi, Russia, becoming the youngest skier to earn the title. Shiffrin then won a gold and a silver medal in the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea.
Despite having many chances and high expectations at the Olympics in 2022, Shiffrin was unsuccessful when competing in the Olympics after coming back without a medal from Beijing, China.
At the World Championship events, Shiffrin has won eight gold medals, four silver medals and three bronze medals, adding up to eighteen global medals. While this is her 15th season competing in the World Cup, Shiffrin already has 155 podium finishes in the World Cup.
Stenmark, a Swedish skier who retired in 1989 and holds 86 total wins, follows Shiffrin in World Cup wins.
The next female skier is American Lindsey Vonn, with 82 World Cup wins, who left the sport in 2019 but returned to competition in 2024 after knee replacement surgery.
At 27 years old, Shiffrin equaled Lindsey Vonn’s number of World Cup race wins. When she last won her 82nd World Cup win, Vonn was 33 years old. At the time, Vonn was the first woman to win 82 World Cup races.
Shiffrin surpassed Vonn’s World Cup race wins a couple of weeks later with 83, becoming the top female World Cup winner. Shiffrin already established the title for most World Cup victories after securing her 87th win in early 2023.
After Shiffrin’s 100th World Cup win, she launched a new initiative called “MIK100: Reset the Sport” while partnering with the Share Winter Foundation. She wants to raise $100,000 to help the youth learn how to snowboard and ski. All of the money raised will help fund these opportunities for about 200 of the youth.
“Helping Share Winter bring more kids to the mountain is really meaningful. It’s far bigger than me winning 100 races. This will make that 100th victory one of the most meaningful to me,” Shiffrin said in a press release.
Previously, Shiffrin co-founded the Jeff Shiffrin Athlete Resiliency Fund for her father, who passed away about five years ago. Shiffrin raised $3.7 million for athletes on the US Ski Team.