Mikaela Shiffrin’s eight-year Olympic medal drought is over.
The American snowboarding standout put in two dominant runs to win the ladies’s slalom on the Winter Games on Wednesday by 1.50 seconds.
The race is not formally over, with dozens of lower-tier racers nonetheless to take the course. But Shiffrin is the chief after the quickest 30 skiers from the primary run.
World champion Camille Rast was in silver medal place and Anna Swenn Larsson in third.
After delivering an beautiful second run to construct on her 0.82-second lead from the primary, Shiffrin stopped within the ending space to take all of it in, slowly squatted and was embraced by the opposite medalists.
Then all of the emotion got here out: Shiffrin pumped her fists to the group and was combating again tears as she approached her mom and coach, Eileen.
Maybe it was a launch of all of the stress on Shiffrin, for a lot of the best Alpine skier of all time, who had did not win an Olympic medal since a gold and silver in Pyeongchang in 2018.
A nightmarish 0-for-6 efficiency in Beijing was adopted in Cortina d’Ampezzo with a fourth-place end with Breezy Johnson within the staff mixed, by which Shiffrin positioned fifteenth within the slalom portion, and an eleventh place within the large slalom.
Her first gold got here within the slalom as a fresh-faced teenager in Sochi 12 years in the past. She is just the second skier (man or lady) to win slalom gold on the Games twice, together with Switzerland’s Vreni Schneider (1988, ’94).
Her third Olympic gold additionally provides her probably the most Alpine snowboarding wins by an American skier.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
