Mikaela Shiffrin is widely considered the greatest Alpine skier of all time. However, over the past several years, she hasn’t had the Olympic hardware to show for it. Now, she does.
Shiffrin won her first Olympic gold medal as a teenager in Sochi in 2014, becoming the youngest slalom champion in Olympic history. Since then, however, she has been shut out of the podium in the event, finishing 4th in 2018 and failing to finish in 2022, despite being the favorite to win the event.
This year, however, was different.
On Wednesday, Shiffrin finished a sensational run to win the slalom with a time of 1:39.10, breaking her long medal drought at the Winter Games with a gold medal.
Shiffrin’s time was 1.5 seconds faster than the second-place finisher, marking the third-largest margin of victory in a women’s Olympic slalom.
After clinching the victory, Shiffrin said it was “really hard to understand and process” the win.
“Maybe,” she added, “just today, I realized what happened in Sochi. It’s crazy.”
This comes after Shiffrin went 0-for-6 on medal opportunities at the Beijing Olympics in 2022.
Shiffrin is now only the second skier – man or woman – to win slalom gold at the Games twice, along with Switzerland’s Vreni Schneider, who did it in 1988 and 1994.
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