A month after competing at the 2026 Winter Olympics, athletes with Vermont ties are returning from the winter racing season with seven medals — and two newly awarded World Cups.
Mikaela Shiffrin, a graduate of Burke Mountain Academy, came back after a 2024 crash at Killington to win slalom gold at last month’s Milan-Cortina Winter Games, then punctuated the point on Wednesday by snagging the World Cup title of best overall Alpine women’s racer for 2025-26.
“This thing sums up a whole season of work and fighting,” Shiffrin told reporters in Hafjell, Norway, as she received her record-tying sixth crystal globe trophy.
Shiffrin’s victory came days after Stratton-trained cross-country skier Jessie Diggins followed up a bronze medal in Italy with her own World Cup season win at the weekend’s Nordic finals in Lake Placid, N.Y.
“I’m really going to miss this,” Diggins told reporters upon securing her fourth overall title just before retiring from the sport.
Jessie Diggins holds the World Cup’s crystal globe trophy during a ceremony March 22 in Lake Placid, New York. Photo by Robert F. Bukaty/AP
Diggins and Shiffrin aren’t the only Vermont-trained Olympians marking the end of the season.
On April 11, Stowe’s Stio Mountain Studio is hosting a “hometown hero celebration” featuring two-time Alpine silver medalist Ryan Cochran-Siegle of Starksboro, Alpine bronze medalist Paula Moltzan of Waitsfield and two-time cross-country silver medalist Ben Ogden of Landgrove.
On April 12, Bromley Mountain Resort in Peru is scheduled to welcome Ogden and 1976 silver medalist Bill Koch at a “Medals in the Mountains” fundraiser to benefit Stratton’s SMS T2 training team and local youth sports programs.
For his part, big-air silver medalist Mac Forehand of Winhall has limited his public appearances to social media, where he recently revealed that he came home to friends and five cinnamon rolls in the shape of Olympic rings.
As Forehand said on TikTok: “We just, like, chilled.”
