On 23 February 2025, on the steep slalom pitch of Sestriere, Mikaela Shiffrin became the first alpine skier in history — male or female — to reach 100 career World Cup victories. She has since pushed the all‑time record to 110 wins, but the century itself was a frontier nobody had ever touched.
A vanishing lead and a calm second run
The moment arrived one day after she failed to qualify for a World Cup second run for the first time in over 14 years. Her first‑run advantage was just 0.09 seconds over Croatia’s Zrinka Ljutic. Then Shiffrin treated the decisive run like a training exercise.
At each split the gap grew, and she crossed in a combined time of one minute, 50.33 seconds. Ljutic finished 0.61 seconds behind, while American Paula Moltzan took third, 0.64 seconds back.
Sixty days from a deep wound
The century stood only 60 days removed from a crash in Killington that punctured her abdomen and tore oblique muscles. Shiffrin was still fighting post‑traumatic stress when she pushed out of the Sestriere start gate. “I don’t know that it’s possible to dream about a milestone like this,” she told reporters afterwards.
Between tears she admitted she still could not read the scoreboard to see if she had won. The victory was her 63rd World Cup slalom triumph — more than double Ingemar Stenmark’s 40 — and her 155th podium, equalling Stenmark’s all‑time mark.
A century mapped across the mountain
Her first win came at age 17 in Åre, Sweden. Through 4,456 days she gathered victories in every World Cup discipline, the only ski racer ever to do so. At the century mark the tally read: 63 slaloms, 22 giant slaloms, five Super Gs, four downhills, three City Events, two Parallel Slaloms and one Alpine Combined.
In 278 starts she won at a rate of one victory every 2.78 races, and 64.5 percent of her podiums were wins — the highest conversion rate among skiers with 50 or more victories. The 110 she holds now, claimed at the Hafjell World Cup Finals, left Stenmark’s 86 as the nearest marker from another era and Lindsey Vonn’s 82 as the closest women’s total. A quiet girl who once dreamed only of better turns had made every tomorrow count.
