Mikaela Shiffrin storms to stunning slalom gold to make Winter Olympic history | Winter Olympics 2026

With one last chance to break her ­barren Olympic run stretching back eight years, Mikaela ­Shiffrin ­delivered in style. The 30-year-old American surged to victory in the women’s slalom on a sun-splashed Wednesday in the Dolomites with a two-run time of 1min 39.10sec, becoming the first US skier to win three Olympic gold medals.

Switzerland’s Camille Rast, the reigning world champion and only woman to have beaten Shiffrin in her signature discipline this season, came in a yawning 1.50sec behind for the silver – the largest winning margin in any Olympic alpine skiing event since 1998 – while Anna Swenn-Larsson of Sweden took the bronze. After fourth-placed Wendy Holdener, of Switzerland, the rest of the field trailed by at least two seconds in the final race of the alpine skiing.

Wearing the No 7 bib, Shiffrin overcame a split-second wobble during her opening run when she clipped a gate midway down the course, but she regained her rhythm immediately and pumped her fist after crossing in 47.13sec, a huge 0.82sec ahead of Germany’s Lena Duerr and the largest first-run lead in an Olympic women’s slalom in 66 years. No one came within a second of her time.

Nearly four hours later, after Duerr’s hopes were ended in a flash when she hooked the first gate out of the hut, Shiffrin was just as commanding on her ­second trip down the gleaming Olympia delle Tofane track, with nearly 600ft of vertical drop. She managed to build on her early lead, becoming the second woman to win the Olympic slalom more than once after Switzerland’s Vreni Schneider. The Vail native stared in disbelief at the clock after gliding through the line before acknowledging the roaring crowd and finding her mother and coach, Eileen, near the finish area.

“The skiing is what I cared about and, of course, to medal and [to win] gold. That’s a dream come true,” ­Shiffrin told NBC. “But at some point this week, I just said: ‘Stop dreaming, just ski.’ I’m so happy to be able to do the right thing in the right moment.”

Shiffrin’s Olympic ledger stripped of context – slalom gold as an 18-year-old prodigy in Sochi, giant slalom gold and combined silver in ­Pyeongchang – would be career-defining for most. But she had failed to win a medal in the six races she entered in ­Beijing four years ago, including three ­shocking DNFs.

While she rebounded to win a fifth overall World Cup title across all disciplines the following year, there were some around the circuit – including Shiffrin – who wondered if a harrowing crash two years ago during a World Cup race in Killington, Vermont, had taken something out of her she would never get back.

But she answered those questions with brio on Wednesday, becoming the oldest US woman to win a gold medal in alpine skiing 12 years after becoming the youngest. She has now won 58 of 72 slalom races when leading after the opening run, an 81% conversion rate that places her among the sport’s great closers.