Team USA’s Mikaela Shiffrin Wins Olympic Gold In Slalom, Will Skip Saturday’s Super-G Race [VIDEO]

Mikaela Shiffrin won her first Olympic gold medal in Pyeongchang on Thursday after putting on an impressive performance in the women’s giant slalom.

Mikaela Shiffrin Slalom Olympic gold medal win

The Colorado native, who will be 23 in March, finished her two runs in a combined time of 2:20.02. Shiffrin comfortably defeated Norwegian silver medalist Ragnhild Mowinckel by 0.39 seconds. Italy’s Federica Brignone finished third with an aggregate time of 2:20.48.

Weather delays due to high winds, which have hit the Games for several days, affected the first run in Thursday’s slalom competition but the second run proved to be a great display of talent.

“Today I was trying really hard but I was also feeling the hill, I was feeling the mountain,” Shiffrin said after her victory. “I was really letting it go as much as I could in that second run down. To get a gold medal skiing like that is really special.”

Shiffrin’s mother and coach announced, however, that the young ski racer won’t be participating in Saturday’s Super-G competition, due to the compressed schedule that resulted from the postponement of two races. Shiffrin will thus not have the opportunity to win five gold medals, as this is the fifth women’s slalom event in South Korea.

“She will have raced and trained – or tried to race – for six days in a row,” the Olympian’s mother Eileen Shiffrin said. “She has to have a day off.”

“It’s not a big goal anyway,” Eileen added.

Shiffrin previously won silver in giant slalom at the 2017 World Championships. She is now the third athlete in U.S. history to win a pair of Olympic gold medals in alpine skiing, after Ted Ligety and Andrea Mead-Lawrence. 

Shiffrin will, however, reportedly compete in the downhill event against 33-year-old veteran Lindsey Vonn, a four-time alpine ski racing World Cup champion and one-time Olympic gold medalist. Vonn finished first in the downhill event in Vancouver in 2010. Vonn’s 81 World Cup victories put her just five away from the all-time record, held by Ingemar Stenmark of Sweden.