Mikaela Shiffrin kept her winning streak intact but left Austria frustrated after edging Switzerland\u2019s Camille Rast in a night slalom at Semmering, criticizing what she described as unsafe race conditions in the final women\u2019s World Cup event of the calendar year.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Italian-born prodigy Lara Colturi, 19, was 0.57 seconds back in third.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have to say this: It was not safe to ski for the girls,\u201d Shiffrin told Austrian television. \u201cFor me, bib four on the first run, it\u2019s not a problem. But for these women starting bib 13, 15, 18, in the 60s, this is not OK.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a very challenging and distracting day,\u201d Shiffrin said. \u201cMy understanding is there were no big injuries, but the way the surface was breaking \u2026 the second run was a bit better, for sure, but I am frustrated with how that went for these women.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mikaela Shiffrin was fastest in the second run to edge Swiss skier Camille Rast by 0.09sec. Photograph: Millo Moravski\/Agence Zoom\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
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. \u201cIt\u2019s a pretty tough one,\u201d she said. \u201cProbably a little bit like overskiing \u2013 too round compared to what\u2019s possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
She corrected those mistakes under pressure in the second run, securing her 106th career World Cup victory and extending her dominance in slalom. \u201cIt was a really hard day, tough conditions, a really big fight,\u201d Shiffrin said. \u201cIt didn\u2019t feel good. I didn\u2019t expect to come down with the green light.\u201d<\/p>\n
The win marked Shiffrin\u2019s fifth straight victory to begin the season, matching her best-ever start from 2018\u201319. 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\u2019s narrow success.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Croatia\u2019s Zrinka Ljutic, last season\u2019s winner at Semmering and the reigning slalom globe holder, finished eighth, 3.75 seconds behind. Shiffrin\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The women\u2019s World Cup now moves to Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, for a giant slalom and slalom next weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mikaela Shiffrin kept her winning streak intact but left Austria frustrated after edging Switzerland\u2019s Camille Rast in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":205652,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-205651","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-newzealand","10":"tag-nz","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205651\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}