Mikaela Shiffrin on Friday did not celebrate her shared victory with Slovakian rival Petra Vlhova in the final World Cup race before the world championships.
Shiffrin did not look at ease right after finishing, bending forward for a while, although in a first reaction on Slovenian TV, she said: “It’s all good.”
Hours later, she skipped a mandatory public awards ceremony and bib draw to get physical therapy for an unnamed issue.
Photo: AP
Her head coach, Mike Day, said that it was an issue she has had to deal with before, but did not elaborate.
Shiffrin is a multiple medal threat at the worlds in Are, Sweden, and was considering a start in the opening super-G race on Tuesday.
After Friday’s race, Shiffrin said she “was a little bit tense sometimes. It feels like it’s been so long since the last race.”
The American sat out various speed events and has competed in just two races in the past three weeks, winning both.
On Friday, she and Vlhova added a draw to their season-long rivalry.
Shiffrin, the Olympic champion in the event, held a lead of 0.48 seconds after the opening run, but Vlhova posted the fastest time in the final run and made up the difference.
“It’s always a relief to see the green light. There was a fight in the second run and I almost lost it at the bottom,” said Shiffrin, who extended her lead to 0.62 seconds midway through her final run before losing the advantage on the icy last section.
“When I watch other sports, I am like hating it when there has to be a loser. I wish everybody could win. So today was nice,” she added with a smile.
The victory is Shiffrin’s 55th career win and ninth in giant slalom, matching the US women’s record of World Cup GS wins set by Tamara McKinney in the 1980s.
Vlhova earned her second victory in giant slalom after also winning in Semmering in December.
She has become Shiffrin’s closest challenger in the technical disciplines, even beating the American in her strongest event, the slalom, at a night race in Flachau early last month. The pair is 1-2 in the overall standings, with Shiffrin leading 1,594 points to 998.
“We are all the time really close. Today we share first place. It’s good for everyone,” said Vlhova, who raised her career tally to eight wins.
With winning the season-long GS title as one of her main goals, Shiffrin extended her lead in the discipline standings. She has 455 points, 81 clear of Worley in second place. Vlhova climbed to third with 318.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier