Mikaela Shiffrin

She started 40th, lost her left shin guard halfway down, but finished in 12th place in the first run.

Shiffrin then posted the fastest time in the second run to secure third place.

Her mother Eileen raced in high school in northwestern Massachusetts in the Berkshires, and her brother Taylor (born 1992) raced for the University of Denver.

Mikaela Pauline Shiffrin (born March 13, 1995) is an American World Cup alpine skier who has the most World Cup wins of any alpine skier in history (men or women) and is considered one of the greatest alpine skiers of all time.

She is a two-time Olympic Gold Medalist.

She is a five-time Overall World Cup champion, a four-time world champion in slalom and a seven-time winner of the World Cup discipline title in that event.

Shiffrin is the youngest slalom champion in Olympic alpine skiing history, at 18 years and 345 days.

Shiffrin won her seventh career Alpine world championships gold medal on February 16, 2023, taking her overall tally to 14 medals from 16 career world championship races, and making Shiffrin the most successful skier in the modern era.

She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

Born in Vail, Colorado, Shiffrin is the second child of Eileen (née Condron) and Jeff Shiffrin, both originally from the Northeastern United States and former ski racers, her mother became a nationally prominent masters racer.

Her paternal grandfather was Jewish.

Shiffrin's father Jeff grew up in New Jersey and was an avid skier on weekends in Vermont with his family.

As an undergraduate, he raced for Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

When Mikaela was eight in 2003, the family moved to rural New Hampshire near Lyme, where her father, an anesthesiologist, worked at Dartmouth–Hitchcock Medical Center.

After five years, he took a new job in Denver; Shiffrin's older brother Taylor was in high school at Burke Mountain Academy, a ski academy in northeastern Vermont, and stayed in the east.

Shiffrin also attended middle school at Burke but went with her parents to Colorado before returning to Burke.

From a young age, Mikaela had strong results in major competitions.

In March 2010, at age 14, she won both the slalom and GS at the Topolino Games in Italy, against skiers from 40 nations.

The following winter, now meeting the FIS minimum age requirement of 15 years, she won a Nor-Am Cup super combined race in December 2010 at Panorama, British Columbia, only the eighth FIS-level race in which she had competed.

Shiffrin followed it up with three podiums in her next three Nor-Am races: runner-up in a super-G, third in a GS, and victory in a slalom.

Weeks later, she won a pair of Nor-Am slalom races held at Sunday River, Maine.

A month later, Shiffrin took the slalom bronze medal at the FIS Junior World Ski Championships held at Crans-Montana, Switzerland (after having been down with a stomach virus the day before).

Shiffrin made her World Cup debut on March 11, 2011, in giant slalom at Špindlerův Mlýn in the Czech Republic.

During the 2012 Alpine Skiing World Cup, Shiffrin, age 16, took her first World Cup podium on December 29, 2011, at a slalom in Lienz, Austria.

Shiffrin won her first World Cup race in December 2012 at age 17, in a night slalom in Åre, Sweden.

She became the second-youngest American to win an alpine World Cup event, behind Judy Nagel (17 yr, 5 mo.).

Shiffrin's second win came two weeks later at a night slalom at Zagreb, Croatia, and her third win 11 days later at another night slalom in Flachau, Austria.

After winning the slalom at the World Cup finals in Lenzerheide, she secured the 2013 season title in the slalom discipline.

Though she spent most of her last two years of high school in Europe on the World Cup circuit, she graduated on time from Burke Mountain Academy in June.

Shiffrin opened the 2014 season in October 2013 in Sölden, Austria, with a career-best sixth in giant slalom, within a half-second of the podium.

She won the next event, a slalom at Levi, Finland, improving on her podium finish the previous year for her fifth World Cup victory.

At Beaver Creek, she was runner-up in the giant slalom, her first World Cup podium in that discipline.

On January 5, Shiffrin secured first place in a two-run slalom race in Bormio, Italy (the race took place there instead of in Zagreb, as scheduled, due to bad snow/weather conditions).

She also won the world cup slalom races in Flachau, Åre, and Lenzerheide to secure a second consecutive World Cup slalom title.

Shiffrin ended the season as the reigning Olympic, World Cup, and world champion in slalom.

That year, she was named one of ESPNW's Impact 25.

In January 2015, Shiffrin named Croatian former ski racer Janica Kostelić and American Bode Miller as her idols while growing up.

Since 2021, she is in a relationship with fellow skier Aleksander Aamodt Kilde.

Shiffrin opened the 2015 season in October 2014 in Sölden with her first World Cup win in giant slalom.

In early April, just a few weeks after her 16th birthday, she won the slalom title at the US National Championships at Winter Park, Colorado, and became the youngest American ski racer to claim a national alpine crown.