Mikaela Shiffrin considered retirement, but decides to skip downhills as she nears career milestone
CBC
American ski star Mikaela Shiffrin won't race downhills in the upcoming World Cup season in which she aims for her 100th career win.
Following the worst crash of her career in January, the two-time Olympic champion even considered not racing at all — but only briefly.
"Then you wake up the next morning and you go out on the slopes, and you think `I'm motivated, like, I want to be here,"' Shiffrin told The Associated Press at a recent media event of her equipment supplier Atomic in Austria.
In the aftermath of the downhill crash that kept her off the slopes for six weeks — and cost her a record-equalling sixth overall title she was favoured to take — Shiffrin has decided to drop the sport's fastest and most dangerous discipline from her schedule.
"No downhill, not this season. I would love to bring it back, but we'll see how it goes," Shiffrin said.
Shiffrin will fully focus on slalom, GS and super-G when the new campaign gets underway with a giant slalom in Soelden, Austria on Oct. 26.
The season also includes world championships in Austria in February.
The record holder since surpassing Swedish great Ingemar Stenmark's tally of 86 World Cup wins in March 2023, Shiffrin stands at 97 and is close to the milestone that was long deemed unreachable.
Shiffrin won nine races last season, even when missing six weeks of racing.
The American sprained the MCL and tibiofibular ligament in her left knee during a full-speed crash into the safety nets on the 2026 Olympic course in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy.
She was among a slew of World Cup, Olympic and world champions to crash hard in a packed January program, including her fiance Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, who had urgent surgery to repair a severe cut and nerve damage in his right calf, plus two torn ligaments in his right shoulder after a terrifying crash near the finish of the downhill in Wengen, Switzerland, two weeks before Shiffrin's mishap.
During their recovery processes, Shiffrin and Kilde contemplated retirement.
"We've had that conversation. We've both had moments where we were like: 'I'm so tired of it, it's time,"' Shiffrin said.
"I'm assuming there's a shift in the mentality from a moment of doubt to like between moments of motivation to more doubt and less motivation. And right now, I'm still pretty much always motivated. But there's challenges that we face. And his injury... it took a while for him to say he wanted to come back."
