Skiing Star Mikaela Shiffrin on Potentially Winning 100 World Cup Races: 'I Don't See It' (Exclusive)

Mikaela Shiffrin explains why winning 100 World Cup races is hard for her to imagine.

By Brian Jones

Alpine skiing star Mikaela Shiffrin made history earlier this year when she won her 87th World Cup race, surpassing Ingemar Stenmark for the most World Cup wins by any alpine skier. And now that the 2023-24 alpine ski World Cup season is about to begin, can the 28-year-old do the unthinkable and reach the 100-win mark? PopCulture.com spoke to Shiffrin and asked if 100 World Cup victories could be an attainable goal. 

"I don't see it. If we're just being realistic, it for sure could happen," Shiffrin told PopCulture. "I just can't imagine what that would look like, how it would feel. I don't know. It was the same thing for 87 [wins]. It was just not something that I could picture. And then it did happen, and it's almost like... Yeah, I don't know. I still can't wrap my mind around that in a way. So I don't even know what to say about 100. I mean, honestly, right now I'm thinking about the shape of the pasta, because after 87, Barilla did a limited edition pasta as an auction item, and they shaped it in the shape of 87. So it was the 87 pasta, and now I'm just thinking about a hundred pasta."

Shiffrin may not see it, but she's coming off one of the best seasons in her career. During the 2022-23 season, Shiffrin won 14 World Cup races, the most since 2019 when she won 17. She also made her way to the podium 18 times, which is also the most since 2019 when she earned 21 podiums. 

Looking back at last season, Shiffrin admitted it was a challenging one. "This season was kind of interesting," Shiffrin said. "At the beginning of the season I started off the season with two wins, and then everyone was like, 'Oh, wow, if you go at this rate, you're going to reset the record this season.' And I was kind of thinking, 'Come on, that's ridiculous.' I'm still eight wins away or something like that."

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"Then I had a couple of races where I didn't win. I wasn't even on the podium. And then people thought, 'Oh, well. Okay, let's slow down. Maybe it's not going to happen.' And then I had a string of races where I won each race through after Christmas and through that period of time. It's just like everybody reacts to the way it's going. And I was kind of doing the same, but I was really trying to focus on just my skiing and not think about the record at all, not worry about it. But as we got closer and closer and closer, more people talked about it more often. I remember being at my 85th victory and I was going to race... We had a race the next day, and all of the media, everything was about... It wasn't about, 'What did you accomplish today? How do you feel about it?' It was all about, 'It's going to happen tomorrow. How do you feel about that?'"

Shiffrin continued: "It was very future-oriented, something that hadn't happened yet, and I was trying to tell everybody, 'It might not happen tomorrow. I'm tired. There's a lot of things that can change.' There's never a given that you win a race. It's not easy. And I never said it was, and you're acting like it is, but it's not." Shiffrin will make her 2023-24 debut on Oct. 28 when she competes in a giant slalom race in Soelden, Austria. 

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