Mikaela Shiffrin: American extends her record with 95th World Cup win
- Published
Mikaela Shiffrin leads the women's overall World Cup standings by more than 400 points
Mikaela Shiffrin extended her record of World Cup wins to 95 and claimed a landmark 150th podium of her career with slalom victory in Jasna, Slovakia.
The American now has nine more World Cup wins than Ingemar Stenmark's previous best mark and is just five short of the Swede's podium record.
Shiffrin, 28, beat Croatia's Zrinka Ljutic by just 0.14 seconds.
She produced a storming finish after Ljutic, 19, had reduced her 0.52-second advantage from the first run.
That lead had been cut to just 0.02 seconds in the final intermediate split of her second run, before Shiffrin showed her class to claim a record 82nd World Cup slalom podium, surpassing Stenmark's 81.
"Today it was definitely a big push to keep all my energy going all the way through the second run," said Shiffrin.
"I knew she (Ljutic) put down an amazing run and I had to push."
Despite defeat, rising star Ljutic claimed her best World Cup finish and only her second podium.
Sweden's Anna Swenn Larsson was third, 0.81 seconds behind Shiffrin's winning time of one minute 48.21 seconds for the two runs.
It was the first race since Slovakia's Petra Vlhova, the Olympic slalom champion and Shiffrin's closest rival, suffered a season-ending knee injury.
Meanwhile, Britain's Dave Ryding finished fifth in the men's World Cup slalom in Kitzbuhel, which was won by Germany's Linus Strasser. Ryding's British team-mates Billy Major and Laurie Taylor were 13th and 19th respectively.