Mikaela Shiffrin enlarges her legend with her 100th victory in the World Cup

February 23, 2025, Sestriere And their link has been the date, place and discipline chosen by the destination to make centenary in sports to a woman who will turn 30 years of March 13. Today Mikaela Shiffrin Celebrate the 100 victories in the skiing World Cup, a feat that is inscribed in the best history of world sport, not only of alpine skiing.

That March 13, 1995, in Vail, a state of Colorado, in the heart of skiing and rocky tourism, no one could know or think or intuit that that thumbnail baptized baptized Mikaela Pauline Shiffrin I was going to achieve a delete of colossal proportions. Probably unrepeatable.

The 100 victories will be a provisional number for someone still young enough to increase them. They would have arrived even much earlier if numerous obstacles had not emerged along the way. To begin with, the pandemic, which canceled the World Cup for a while. This season, a fall in the Killington giant, on November 30, caused Mikaela an abdominal injury that required surgical intervention and kept it inactive for two months. He returned out of form, but could, in the Saalbach World Cup, conquer a gold in the team combined.

Sestriere, after the World Cup, did not seem an adequate place to round the feat. In the first giant, on the 21st, Mikaela ended in the 25th position. In the second, the 22, in the 33rd. The cut of the 30 best times did not pass since 2012. But, finally, Sestriere, mocking, turned out to be the magical name.

Mikaela has had a bad time. As a child he was diagnosed “anxiety disorder, attention deficit and hyperactivity”, to suffer the psychological consequences of which they are victims, because of the pressure, so many athletes at the highest level. Disorders that threaten to crush them and that have only recently begun with all their crudeness to come to light as a form of liberation and cure.

Mikaela, to which her parents had risen, scared, for the first time to ski at two years, she was a winner. He had debuted early in the World Cup two days before serving 16. His first victory arrived 13 months later. In 2014 it had already been, in Sochi, Olympic gold in the Eslalon. In 2013 and 2015, world champion also in Eslalon, his favorite specialty, although he has known wins in all.

But something did not work with the same perfection in his head. He became gradually more nervous. He vomited before the tests and began to wonder what real sense all that had, what it served. Meanwhile, he continued to win and, given his introverted and little given character to the exposure of his feelings, he did not send alarm signals to those who surrounded her. Not even his relatives.

At first he thought that he experienced, physically and mentally, a normal reaction, the result of the demands of any order, personal, national, commercial, of the high competition. It was replaced for, in 2018, in the Pyeongchang games, and although it failed in the Slalon, it won gold in the giant and silver in the combined.

In February 2020 his father, JeffHe suffered a fall at his house and was in a coma. Mikaela was in Italy when her brother Taylor He called her to give her bad news. He arrived a few hours before death. That tragedy almost destroyed it. He was unable to ski and Covid suppressed competitions to which she, on the other hand, would not have been able to attend with guarantees. He seriously thought about leaving skiing: “I was dejected, without self -esteem and with a constant feeling of hopelessness.”

In that state of (des) mood, and with its streak of victories diminished after the resumption of competitions, it faced the Beijing ‘2022 games. The result could only be catastrophic. The link, the giant and the combined, its best tests, and ended ninth in the supergigent and thirteenth in the descent did not end. He played background. And he realized that, in his words, “he had to stop fleeing and hiding what he felt. I had to choose between the shame of telling or undressing my soul and being able to move forward.”

He got it with the help of specialists and friends in the world of sport, who understood better than anyone what happened to him. Especially your partner, the Norwegian Aleksander Aamodt Sourceanother world skiing star. In January of this year, Mikaela suffered a knee injury in the descent of Cortina d’Ampezzo. He returned on time, in March, in the estuctors of the season, to be imposed on the Slalons de Are and Saalbach. Personal crises seem to have been left behind. With their overcoming, the skier and the woman have been reinforced for sport and life.

The “centenaria” Mikaela carries two rings in the fingers: one that belonged to his father and that of his commitment to Kilde. And a currency in the helmet: ABFTTB. “Always Be Faster Than The Boys.” Always faster than boys.

You are not reason.