By Alan Baldwin
CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy, Feb 18 (Reuters) – U.S. great Mikaela Shiffrin won women’s slalom gold, and her first Olympic medal since 2018, with a dominant performance in the final Alpine ski race of the Milano Cortina Games on Wednesday.
Switzerland’s Camille Rast, the only skier who has beaten Shiffrin on the World Cup this season, took silver and Sweden’s Anna Swenn Larsson the bronze, at the age of 34, but both were far behind their rival.
The most successful World Cup skier of all time, with a record 108 wins, scorched down the first run a mighty 0.82 clear of the field and increased her lead to 1.5 seconds over Rast after two legs.
Her combined winning time was one minute 39.10 seconds.
Shiffrin was the overwhelming favourite after winning seven of eight World Cup slaloms this season but the lack of medals after two events, along with a blank in Beijing four years ago, had ramped up the pressure.
“This feels like a really big moment,” she told NBC television.
“Of course a medal and gold, that’s a dream come true. But at some point this week, I just said, like, stop dreaming. Just ski.”
CAREER THIRD OLYMPIC GOLD MEDAL
Even after the first run down the Olimpia delle Tofane piste, there remained a lingering uncertainty but Shiffrin nailed the second — her run slower only than teammate Paula Moltzan’s mighty effort.
The gold was Shiffrin’s career third Olympic title, adding to the slalom title she won in 2014 and the giant slalom gold from Pyeongchang in 2018, where she also took a combined silver.
Shiffrin is the first female U.S. Alpine skier to win three golds and Wednesday’s was also the second for the team in Cortina after Breezy Johnson’s downhill success.
Germany’s Lena Duerr was the sole skier to come within a second of her time in the first run but her hopes evaporated in a flash after she straddled the first gate out of the hut on the second run.
Sweden’s Cornelia Oehlund had been third after the first run, albeit a second off the pace, but she too was unable to convert that into a medal after breaking a ski pole and failing to finish.
Shiffrin saw what happened and then put in a flawless run. As the crowd cheered, it took what seemed an age before she raised her arm and a ski pole to acknowledge what she had achieved.
She appeared to be crying as she embraced her mother Eileen.
“I’m so happy to be able to do the right thing in the right moment,” said Shiffrin, once in front of the television cameras.
JUST HUMAN AT THE END OF THE DAY
The 30-year-old, who had spoken on Instagram earlier in the week of “narratives built on a limited understanding of what this sport truly demands”, had finished fourth in the team combined with Johnson and 11th in the giant.
Had she also skied out on Wednesday, or made a costly error, there would have been plenty of critics ready to air their opinions.
“She receives a lot of press, good and bad, and she’s very good at handling it. But it gets to somebody at some point if people are only saying bad things about you,” said Moltzan, who went from 28th after the first run to eighth.
“We’re just human at the end of the day. And she’s just a human. Mistakes happen. You don’t have the perfect run, and we get ripped apart by people that sit on the couch and that sucks.”
Rast’s silver was her first Olympic medal while Swenn Larsson’s bronze made her the oldest female Olympic Alpine medallist after Italian Federica Brignone, a double champion in Cortina.
“It’s my last Olympics… for sure I am not here in four years, so it feels extra special to put it together today,” said the Swede.
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin; additional reporting by Julien Pretot and Sara RossiEditing by Alison Williams and Christian Radnedge)
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