Thirteen appears to be a lucky number for Mikaela Shiffrin.
Shiffren entered this racing season eight victories short of the women’s alpine skiing record, held by Lindsey Vonn with 82 first-place finishes.
On Tuesday, in her 13th season on the World Cup circuit, Shiffrin notched her 83rd victory, and is now only four wins away from surpassing the overall record of 86 wins for skiers of any gender; it’s now held by Swedish skier Ingemar Stenmark.
Shiffrin has close ties to Vermont. She graduated from the grade 9-12 Burke Mountain Academy in the Northeast Kingdom, first took to the Vermont slopes as a child, trained as a teenager and, except for this year, has won every Killington World Cup slalom race since the international circuit’s lone U.S. women’s competition began in 2016.
On Tuesday, Shiffrin set the women’s alpine record in a giant slalom in Kronplatz, Italy, as her combined time for two giant slalom runs put her just ahead of Swiss skier Lara Gut-Behrami.
It was her ninth win of the 2022-23 season, with 14 more races to go.
Shiffrin, as she often does, soft-pedaled her record performance, telling NBC Sports, “This number 83, it was almost completely out of my mind today. … I guess it’s very fitting that it would come in the moment when I actually am thinking about it the least and don’t expect it at all.”
Shiffrin leads the women’s competition with 1,417 combined points, far ahead of Gut-Behrami, who’s in second place with 556 points.
In slalom and giant slalom categories, Shiffrin holds first place. In downhill, she holds ninth and in super-G she holds 11th.
Shiffrin thanked the course workers at Kronplatz for the “best conditions we had in a race all season” in an interview with FIS Alpine shortly after the race.
Her record-breaking World Cup season comes after a difficult 2022 Winter Olympic season, in which she did not secure any medals.