Mikaela Shiffrin can reach her 100th career win this season, says Bode Miller
American skiing great Bode Miller expects compatriot Mikaela Shiffrin to have another dominant season and would not be surprised if she tops this season by becoming the first alpine skier to win 100 World Cup races.
The season starts this weekend in the Austrian seaside resort of Sölden with men’s and women’s giant slaloms on the Rettenbach Glacier.
Shiffrin has reached 88 career wins after breaking Ingemar Stenmark’s long-standing record (86) last season, when she also recorded 14 wins over the course of the year.
The 28-year-old also recorded 17 wins in 2019, her most dominant season, and 12 in 2018.
“My theory would be that she will have a dominant season,” Miller, a two-time World Cup overall champion and the most successful American male skier of all time, told Reuters in a telephone interview from Sölden.
“She has proven time and time again that she has the class to do it,” he said, adding that Shiffrin could win 12 or more races to reach the century.
“She continually overcomes obstacles, overcomes challenges and continues to achieve. Every time we talk about superlatives, she’s the best there ever was.
Miller, in Austria for the European launch of his Peak Ski Company’s recreational skis, said it wasn’t as if Shiffrin was a flash in the pan.
“She’s been doing it since the beginning of her career and she’s expanding into all the different disciplines with incredible class,” he added.
“If she comes out looking like she did last year, I think she could do it. She certainly has the consistency to do it.
Shiffrin told Reuters this week she wanted to see how much faster she could ski, how much further she could go in the sport.
She will focus more on downhilling, the most dangerous discipline of all.
Miller, who won 33 World Championship races in all five disciplines, said this came with risks, but Shiffrin was different.
“She’s so stable and so strong and she gets off balance so rarely that I don’t see it as the same kind of risk that I would have said for a lot of the guys I saw transitioning from the technical side,” he said. explained.
“She is certainly exceptional and we are witnessing the best there has ever been. That’s something to be excited about.”
Odermatt again
In the men’s race, Swiss Marco Odermatt finished with a record number of points last season and Miller agreed it was again difficult to see anything other than more of the same, although the margins for error were slim.
He also felt like Odermatt had it a little easier than it might have in the past.
“Not to beat the World Cup field, but I don’t think it’s as deep as it was 15 or 20 years ago when we had really deep World Cup fields and 15 or 20 guys could win and they all had their formula,” he said.
Miller said Peak could eventually build racing skis for juniors as early as this winter, but felt there was little commercial gain with recreational skis that are so different now.
The six-time Olympic medalist also acknowledged that the sport would have to change in the face of global warming.
“For me, low on the priority scale is whether or not we can hold World Cup races. That is a luxury,” he said. “What’s more worrying are the storm systems… That’s a much more real issue, where we’re talking about human lives and the likelihood of mass migrations.
“I don’t think skiing will disappear. They will have to make some changes. We are faced with the reality that things are changing and we cannot continue the status quo.”