Mikaela Shiffrin's 100 World Cup wins: A career of dominance, by the numbers

New York Times

24-02-2025

After a three-month delay, American star Mikaela Shiffrin won her milestone 100th World Cup race on Sunday, a number never seen before in Alpine skiing.
Shiffrin has been the all-time leader in wins at the sport's top level, men or women, for two years, and she looks far from done. At 29, Shiffrin now has three wins this season despite missing two months of competition after an injury suffered in a crash in November. She returned last month and, though still struggling with the mental and physical toll of the injury, has quickly found her way back to form in her best discipline, the slalom. She's now won three of the four slalom events in which she's competed this season. The only time she didn't was in her first race back from the injury, in late January.
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She won her first World Cup race at 17. She was an Olympic gold medalist at 18. And in her early 20s, she redefined what was possible in the sport over a three-year stretch that brought an astounding 40 World Cup victories — a total that by itself would be in seventh place on the women's all-time wins list.
It's tough to make sense of that unprecedented dominance. But here's a look at it all, in six charts.
No nation has been kinder to Shiffrin than Austria, where she's won 23 races, 13 more than her home country in second place. That's thanks in part to Austria's prevalence on the slalom schedule, frequently featuring three or four tour stops a year. All 23 of those wins are in either slalom or giant slalom. Only 22 women have more World Cup wins total than Shiffrin has in Austria.
Sunday's win came in Sestriere, Italy, just the second time in her career she's won at that venue. Her other five Italian wins came in Kronplatz (three times), Bormio and Cortina d'Ampezzo.
Her winningest single venue? That's Levi, Finland, where she's a seven-time winner, including earlier this season before her injury. Second on the list is a tie between Are, Sweden — the site of the next World Cup slalom event, March 8-9 — and Killington, Vt., near where she trained at Burke Mountain Academy and the site of her crash in November. She's won at each six times.
Since winning her first in December 2012, Shiffrin has posted at least three victories in every World Cup season since. Her best year was 2018-19, when she put on a dazzling all-discipline display and won a record 17 races in a single year. That year, she became the first skier ever to win the overall, super-G, giant slalom and slalom World Cup titles in the same season. Only 27 women have won more World Cup titles in their careers than Shiffrin won that season.
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Slalom is by far her best discipline, with 63 of her wins coming there. But she's won at least four times in each of the four main individual disciplines. She hasn't won any event besides slalom since December 2023, when she won a giant slalom in Lienz, Austria, and a downhill in St. Moritz, Switzerland.
If you were to separate Shiffrin's slalom wins from the rest of her victories and consider those totals as two separate skiers, they would rank as the second- and eighth-winningest women's World Cup skiers of all time. Her 63 victories in slalom would trail only Lindsey Vonn's 82 total titles. Her 37 wins in other disciplines would tie with Austrian great Marlies Schild not much further down the list.
On the men's side, only Austria's Marcel Hirscher (67) and Sweden's Ingemar Stenmark (86) have more overall World Cup wins than Shiffrin has slalom titles. Stenmark, who starred in the 1970s and '80s, held the record for more than 40 years before Shiffrin passed him in March 2023.
In 2015, when Vonn set the women's all-time record of 63 World Cup wins, a young Shiffrin was just in her third World Cup season and had 12 wins to her name. Four years later, Vonn retired with 82 wins and Shiffrin had closed the gap, trailing Vonn by 20. Another four years later, Shiffrin passed the idle Vonn in Kronplatz, scoring her 83rd win. Shiffrin has since added 17 more to the unprecedented total.
Vonn came out of retirement this year, and though catching back up to Shiffrin isn't in the cards, she's hoping to qualify for the 2026 Olympics. Her best finish on the World Cup tour this year was a fourth-place finish in a super-G in January. Vonn and Shiffrin were teammates on the 2018 Olympic team, with each winning medals.
There's no statistical asterisk here. Among the six winningest female Alpine skiers of all time, Shiffrin has the best winning percentage, getting her 100 wins in 278 starts. Vonn got her 82 wins over 402 starts (and counting). Shiffrin won her 82nd race in her 233rd start. Her current win percentage applied over 402 starts would yield 144 race wins.
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Austria's Annemarie Moser-Proell, who ruled the 1970s, and Germany's Vreni Schneider, who starred in the late '80s and early '90s, won at similar rates to Shiffrin (and made podiums at a higher clip) but both competed in just 11 World Cup seasons at a time when there were generally fewer races per season, averaging around 15 races per. Shiffrin is in her 13th season, averaging over 21 races.
One other bit of history Shiffrin achieved Sunday: Her 155 podium finishes are tied with Stenmark for the most all time.
Source: Stathead.com
OK, now we're just having fun. Shiffrin has more wins in 278 races, topping an entire field of the world's best skiers each time, than 11 teams across the big four North American men's leagues (NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB) have in their last 278 regular-season games.
That stretch goes back to 2007 for the NFL. The Cleveland Browns and Jacksonville Jaguars fall short of 100 wins in that span. Since December 2021, eight NBA and NHL teams have won fewer than 100 out of 278 games, the worst of which is the San Jose Sharks, with just 75 wins. The Chicago White Sox are the lone MLB team shy of the mark with just 85 wins since May 2023.
(Top illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photo: Marco Bertorello / AFP via Getty Images)