Eit is done. The countdown is up. The record number has been reached. On Saturday, Mikaela Shiffrin won her 87th World Cup race with the slalom in Are, replacing Ingemar Stenmark as the most successful runner in alpine skiing history. Finally, one would like to say. Because the question of the record haunted and irritated Shiffrin, as if the deeper meaning of her career or even her life as an athlete depended on it. She herself does not count her victories. And she rejects the comparison. For the young American, who will be celebrating her 28th birthday this Monday, the name Stenmark is “synonymous with ski racing”. He set the standard. For all time. Not her.
Stenmark, on the other hand, who will be 67 next Saturday, admires Shiffrin for her way of skiing and believes she can achieve 100 successes – at least. The elegant Swede was stylistically ahead of his time, but secured his 86 victories in the 1970s and 80s exclusively in the technical disciplines – 40 in slalom, 46 in giant slalom. Shiffrin, on the other hand, was also at the top in downhill and super-G, combination and parallel races. Stenmark is also very impressed by this, “because I would never have been able to do that”. Unlike the American, the Swede was not a complete skier.
Versatility speaks for Shiffrin
The only time he threw himself into a downhill race because he needed points for the combination was in Kitzbühel in 1981. But the great esthete did not cut a good figure on the Streif, reaching the finish line more than ten seconds behind with a bang and a bang. The journey was a borderline experience for him, while the legendary ZDF sports reporter Harry Valérien feared for Stenmark’s health.
Even if competitors with a distance of 40 years cannot be compared – and women and men at that: The versatility speaks clearly for Shiffrin. She masters all disciplines if she only competes.
And the stress on the other side of the slopes is also on a completely different level. For a decade and a half, the silent man from Tärnaby got away with responding to reporters’ questions in an emphatically monosyllabic and only factual manner. Otherwise he was left alone. In contrast, the lively woman from Vail has appeared as a public figure in contemporary history since she was world champion for the first time at the age of 17 – and she also has to prove herself in this difficult slalom on sometimes slippery terrain.
She also understands this technique, plays along and delivers. As a child of her time, Shiffrin serves fans and followers on various social media platforms, but also lets the public participate via classic media. Shiffrin acts openly – also because she wants to create and tell the story about her life as best she can.
Not only does she publicly celebrate her victories, but she also confronts defeats, as in the trilogy of her eliminations at the Olympics. Even the tragic accidental death of her father, her love for skiing colleague Aleksander Aamodt Kilde or even problems because of her female cycle – Shiffrin chooses to flee forward and shares it. The success of your life is not decided between the goalposts.
The question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything else was answered with “42” in the legendary novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, published in Stenmark’s day. Generations of science fiction fans have puzzled over the meaning of this supposedly magical number. But the answer was just a joke author Douglas Adams once indulged in while writing. 87 is just a number. At least with Mikaela Shiffrin. The magnitude of their achievement does not depend on the amount of their victories.
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