COPPER MOUNTAIN, Colorado – The U.S. women’s medal streak came to an end on home snow.
After having at least one skier on the podium at the first three World Cups this year, the Americans did not have anyone in the top 10 of Saturday’s giant slalom race at Copper Mountain. Nina O’Brien was the top U.S. finisher, in 11th place, while Mikaela Shiffrin made up some ground in the second run to finish 14th.
Paula Moltzan, the only other American to make the second run, crashed and did not finish.
‘This surface is so specific,’ Shiffrin said. ‘It’s just really difficult to be really fast, consistently, for the whole run. So watching the women who had come before me, especially the top women, I felt like there were some pretty obvious things that they were bringing into their turns that I could at least try for the second run, and I was able to execute that for like 90% of the run.
‘So I’m psyched because it’s hard to change your mentality between the first and second run of a race and to actually put that into play and execute it. And I feel like I was able to do that for the most part. And that’s a great direction for the coming races.’
Alice Robinson of New Zealand was first in both runs to get her fifth World Cup win, finishing with a combined time of 1:58.91. That was almost a second ahead of Austria’s Julia Scheib, who finished in 1:59.87. Thea Louise Stjernesund of Norway was third in 1:59.99.
The Americans came to Copper, a rare domestic World Cup, on a hot streak. Moltzan was second in the season’s first GS race with Shiffrin missing the podium by 0.15 seconds and O’Brien finishing sixth. Shiffrin then won the next two World Cups, both slaloms, with Moltzan getting top fives in both.
But the entire U.S. team struggled at Copper. Only three of the six Americans who started the first run qualified for the second. Keely Cashman (46th) and Tricia Mangan (48th) were outside the top 30, and Elisabeth Bocock and Kjersti Moritz did not finish the first run. Bocock crashed midway through and Moritz, who was making her World Cup debut, skied out near the top of the course.
The surface was the biggest challenge, Shiffrin said after finishing 18th in the first run, because pushing normally generates speed. On this snow, however, it didn’t.
‘But you still have to have the intensity,’ Shiffrin said. ‘It’s a little bit of a different feeling. Which is kind of interesting.’
It didn’t help that they’ve been bouncing around the globe for the last few weeks. Or that Copper is the first World Cup with two races and is at the highest altitude of any venue on the circuit.
‘It just kind of is what it is,’ Shiffrin said. ‘It’s where we are.’
There were positives to take from the race, though. Shiffrin said she’s happy with where her GS skiing is, and every race helps her build intensity and perfect her mentality. Her second run was much improved — she was 10th-fastest overall, and posted the fastest time on the third section of the course and fourth-fastest on the first.
Best of all, she finished the race.
On this same weekend last year, Shiffrin had a nasty crash during the second run of the GS at the World Cup in Killington, Vermont. She suffered a gash in her obliques that cost her the next two months of the season, and she experienced PTSD in the GS for the rest of the season.
Compared to that, Saturday’s race was a win.
‘The best thing is making it to the finish of the GS at this time of the year,’ Shiffrin said with a smile. ‘I would rank that above everything else.’