No. 100 will have to wait for Mikaela Shiffrin.
Shiffrin crashed during the second run of a giant slalom in Killington, Vermont, on Saturday, her first chance at getting her 100th World Cup victory. She was taken off the hill on a sled and is being evaluated, U.S. Ski and Snowboard said.
“More info to come, but take solace in the fact that she asked about her splits,” the federation said in a post on X.
It’s also not clear whether Shiffrin will be able to race in Sunday’s slalom. She’s won the slalom six times at Killington, and also has won the first two slalom races this season.
Shiffrin had a comfortable lead after the first run Saturday. But with shadows lengthening on an already icy course, Shiffrin appeared to get off-balance and lose her edge as she took a tight line around a gate less than 15 seconds from the finish line. She tumbled over and slid sideways, hitting one gate and somersaulting into another before slamming into the safety netting on the side of the hill.
She stayed down for several minutes as safety personnel immediately rushed to her side. The crowd at Killington, which is always raucous for the Americans, immediately grew silent.
It’s only the eighth time in Shiffrin’s World Cup career, and first since 2018, that she hasn’t finished a giant slalom race, and it brought a shocking end to a day that began with such promise.
Shiffrin has won six times at Killington, a two-hour drive from the Burke Mountain Academy she attended as a teenager and one of her favorite stops on the circuit. Though she’d never won a giant slalom race at Killington — her best finishes were third place last year and in 2019 — she came out blazing in the first run Saturday.
Holding a tight line, she posted the second-fastest times on the first two sections of the course before blistering the third. While some of the other top contenders got tripped up by the icy terrain, Shiffrin said she found the surface to be “really great.”
“The course and the conditions are really spectacular,” she said between runs. “It’s pretty straightforward. There may be some spots on the hill with a few stones that are surfacing as people ski. Some of the skiers, they look fine, and then their ski slips out.
“I don’t think it’s an issue of not enough grip so much as you hit a stone and you lose the edge,” she added. “It’s pretty typical for this race here.”
Shiffrin’s time for the first run was 55.78, more than three-tenths of a second faster than Sara Hector of Sweden. That cushion meant the victory was hers for the taking, but it wasn’t meant to be.