Mikaela Shiffrin kept her winning streak intact but left Austria frustrated after edging Switzerland’s Camille Rast in a night slalom at Semmering, criticizing what she described as unsafe race conditions in the final women’s World Cup event of the calendar year.
The American rebounded from a sluggish opening run to post the fastest time in the evening session, finishing 0.09 seconds ahead of world champion Rast. Albania’s Italian-born prodigy Lara Colturi, 19, was 0.57 seconds back in third.
Shiffrin, who started fourth on the first run, was more than half a second off the pace on a rapidly deteriorating Panorama course, where mild weather forced organizers to inject water and salt into the snow. Despite those measures, the surface broke apart in multiple sections during the afternoon session, which began at 2.15pm local time.
“I have to say this: It was not safe to ski for the girls,” Shiffrin told Austrian television. “For me, bib four on the first run, it’s not a problem. But for these women starting bib 13, 15, 18, in the 60s, this is not OK.”
Only 40 of the 77 starters completed the opening run, and a deficit of nearly six seconds was still enough to qualify for the final. Conditions improved slightly for the night session, held three and a half hours later as temperatures dropped.
“It was a very challenging and distracting day,” Shiffrin said. “My understanding is there were no big injuries, but the way the surface was breaking … the second run was a bit better, for sure, but I am frustrated with how that went for these women.”
Mikaela Shiffrin was fastest in the second run to edge Swiss skier Camille Rast by 0.09sec. Photograph: Millo Moravski/Agence Zoom/Getty Images
Shiffrin was narrowly ahead of Rast halfway through the first run but lost significant time in the lower section, later admitting she had overskied the course. “It’s a pretty tough one,” she said. “Probably a little bit like overskiing – too round compared to what’s possible.”
She corrected those mistakes under pressure in the second run, securing her 106th career World Cup victory and extending her dominance in slalom. “It was a really hard day, tough conditions, a really big fight,” Shiffrin said. “It didn’t feel good. I didn’t expect to come down with the green light.”
The win marked Shiffrin’s fifth straight victory to begin the season, matching her best-ever start from 2018–19. She closed last season with a win and then dominated the first four slaloms of the current Olympic campaign by an average margin of 1.5 seconds before Sunday’s narrow success.
Shiffrin extended her lead in the slalom standings to 220 points over Colturi, with three more races scheduled in January and two in March ahead of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics. A race win is worth 100 points.
Croatia’s Zrinka Ljutic, last season’s winner at Semmering and the reigning slalom globe holder, finished eighth, 3.75 seconds behind. Shiffrin’s teammate Paula Moltzan, seventh after the first run, straddled a gate in the second a day after crashing heavily in the giant slalom on the same hill.
The women’s World Cup now moves to Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, for a giant slalom and slalom next weekend.
