Mikaela Shiffrin had anticipated it on Saturday, celebrating her 85th World Cup victory at Spindleruv Mlyn, the track where she started on the international circuit almost twelve years ago in 2011. Faced with increasing competition dense, she felt she had to go to the limit to have a chance of winning, despite winning with a comfortable margin.

This season, the Swedish Anna Swenn Larsson and the Swiss Wendy Holdener came to disrupt the duel between Shiffrin and the Slovak Petra Vlhova which had settled between tight pickets last winter.

There is now a fifth slalomer who joins the fight, since Lena Dürr, Shiffrin's first pursuer on Saturday in the Czech resort, ended more than eleven years of scarcity for German skiing in slalom.

At the time, it was the versatile Maria Höfl-Riesch who won in Levi in ​​November 2011.

After a dominated first run and nearly seven tenths of a second ahead of Dürr, Shiffrin ran out of juice in the second run, to fail just six hundredths behind the German.

It must be said that she had a seventh race on Sunday in the space of ten days, after the speed events at Cortina d'Ampezzo (Italy), and the technical events at Kronplatz (Italy) and Spindleruv Mlyn.

Small consolation globe

"It took me a long time, and I just risked everything. It's crazy to have realized that today", commented after the race Lena Dürr, who had signed ten years ago to the day. his first victory in the parallel slalom in Moscow in 2013.

"(Shiffrin's) lead was quite big, so I didn't think it was still possible to win today. But I tried to put everything. It was going really well in the last races, we knew that it was possible”, she added to the microphone of the German public television ZDF.

Mikaela Shiffrin (left), Lena Duerr and Zrinka Ljutic in Spindleruv Mlyn, Czech Republic, January 29, 2023 © VLADIMIR SIMICEK / AFP

Dürr has been on the podium in four of the last five slaloms and is a world medal contender in three weeks.

At 27, Shiffrin has yet to equal Ingemar Stenmark's record of 86 wins.

For that she will have to wait and she will still have eleven races, including four in technique, this season to achieve this.

Small consolation prize for the skier from Vail (Colorado): on Sunday she won her seventh small slalom globe, since Holdener, who was eliminated in the first run, and Vlhova, only 13th on Sunday, are 255 points behind in the classification of the slalom World Cup, two races from the end.

In the overall World Cup standings, Shiffrin now has 1,697 points, 731 more than Vlhova.

Eleven races from the end of the season, she has already placed a hand and three fingers on a fifth large crystal globe.

Shiffrin will now be able to breathe a little next week, before heading for the French Alps and the resorts of Courchevel and Méribel, for the Worlds-2023 (February 6-19).

She will aim for a fifth world title in slalom and a first in giant slalom at the end of the fortnight, but will start on February 6 with the defense of her world title in combined, the only one she had brought back from Cortina d'Ampezzo in 2021. .

© 2023 AFP