Mikaela Shiffrin clinched her fifth overall World Cup title on Saturday but still awaits her record-tying 86th career race win.
Shiffrin finished tied for fifth place on Saturday in Kvitfjell, Norway, giving her enough points to seal the overall title.
“It is pretty wild actually. You know the overall, or any season titles, it’s always strange to explain how it feels on the day you win it if you didn’t win the race,” Shriffin, 27, said.
She also has locked up the slalom title and leads the giant slalom standings by 118 points with two races left.
Shiffrin won the overall title in three straight years — 2017-19 — and also in 2022. Her five championships put her second all-time among women behind Annemarie Moser-Proell of Austria. Another Austrian, Marcel Hirscher, is the overall record holder with eight straight titles from 2012-19.
With her next World Cup race win, Shiffrin will have 86, which would tie Swedish great Ingemar Stenmark for the all-time record. She broke fellow American Lindsey Vonn’s women’s record, which stood at 82, in January.
Shiffrin will compete in the Super G on Sunday. She ranks eighth in that discipline this season.
Shiffrin said she had her eyes on the overall title from the beginning.
“That’s really amazing. That (overall title) was like the big, big goal for me this season,” Shiffrin said. “I had such a big focus on it that I was even talking about it in interviews in the beginning of the season. Normally I don’t talk about it so much because it takes a long time to figure out if you can do it.”
Saturday’s downhill was won by Kajsa Vickhoff Lie, who became the first Norwegian woman to win a downhill event in the World Cup in its 56-year-history.
–Field Level Media