Mikaela Shiffrin sits alone on World Cup throne

Mikaela Shiffrin secured World Cup win No. 87 over the weekend in Sweden. (Getty Images)

Two days before her 28th birthday, Mikaela Shiffrin became the greatest World Cup skier of all time.

Swedish legend Ingemar Stenmark was 32 when he won his 86th career race on the circuit, a record that stood for 34 years. Now that Shiffrin has 87 wins — with a four-year head-start on Stenmark — it’s any wonder what it might take for another skier to, one day, surpass that achievement. 

The product of Vermont’s Burke Mountain Academy, Shiffrin continued her assault on the record books this winter with a weekend to remember in Åre, Sweden earlier this month. She won Friday’s giant slalom race by 0.64 seconds over Federica Brigone of Italy to give her 86 World Cup wins. That left her with a chance on Saturday to take the record in slalom, an event in which she’s claimed 53 of her 87 career victories. 

Shiffrin won the slalom by 92 hundredths of a second over Wendy Holdener of Switzerland.

“It’s been hard to describe,” Shiffrin told reporters after setting the record. “It’s not over yet, which is even more ridiculous. I still had the same feeling at the start of this run that I have every race—I shouldn’t feel pressure, but somehow I feel something in my heartbeat. That’s the anticipation we want to feel as ski racers and I have it—it’s stronger than ever. I’m just getting started.”

It has been quite the stretch for Shiffrin, who now has 13 victories on the World Cup circuit this season, the most she has had in any one year since she won 17 in 2019. She also took home gold in giant slalom at the world championships and silver in slalom and had already clinched her fifth overall World Cup title early in March with seven races of the season remaining. The 27-year-old finished fifth in the downhill at Kvitfjell but ahead of her only rival for the slalom crown, Swiss racer Lara Gut-Behrami. With 700 points still available, Shiffrin held a 796-point lead.

But all the recent success doesn’t mean Shiffrin isn’t making changes along the way. In February, while at the world championships in Courchevel-Méribel, she parted ways with her longtime head coach, Mike Day. 

“After working with Mike Day for seven seasons, I’ve decided to move forward with new leadership on my team for the next phase of my career,” Shiffrin said in a statement released by the U.S. Ski Team. “I want to thank Mike and acknowledge all of his work and dedication over the last several years.”

Day lives in Vermont and was once the head coach for the boys ski team at Green Mountain Valley School. 

“Mikaela wants to do something different going forward. She wants a new challenge. And she informed Mike and Mike decided to go home,” U.S. alpine director Patrick Riml told the Associated Press. “It’s a shock for me that he took off.”

Shiffrin’s 87th win comes 12 years after she started her first race on the World Cup circuit when she was only 15. She won her first World Cup race nine months later, becoming the second-youngest American to do so. 

Now, she’s the best. 

“It is the greatest honor of my career to be mentioned in the same sentence as Ingemar Stenmark,” Shiffrin wrote on her social media channels. “Incomprehensible and truly unforgettable.”