CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Mikaela Shiffrin will get one of the first cracks at the giant slalom course.
Shiffrin will start third in the GS race at the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics on Sunday, Feb. 15. Paula Moltzan, who won bronze with Jackie Wiles in the team combined, is just behind her at No. 5 and Nina O’Brien will start 11th. A.J. Hurt is the last American in the race, starting 23rd.
The start order for the second run will be reverse order of the results from the first.
The GS is the first of the tech races, though Shiffrin, Moltzan and Hurt all did slalom runs in the team combined. Shiffrin will be looking for a better result in the GS after notably struggling in the team combined, finishing 15th out of 18.
‘My skiing in the first race didn’t come together the way I visualized. I fought for every hundredth and didn’t totally find the right execution,’ Shiffrin wrote in a social media post Friday, Feb. 13.
‘… That’s ski racing: fine margins, endless changing variables, and constant adaptation,’ she added. ‘We’ve taken the lessons, analyzed and adjusted, and are moving forward – with focus, intention, and belief in the practice.’
But expectations for Shiffrin in the GS should be tempered. Though one of her Olympic gold medals is in the GS (2018) and two of her 12 season titles are in the discipline, she’s spent the past 15 months trying to regain her form in the discipline after the devastating crash that left her with a puncture wound in her obliques and PTSD.
Her third-place finish in the last GS before the Olympics was her first podium in the discipline in two years. She has not won a GS race since December 2023.
Moltzan, meanwhile, has been on the GS podium three times this World Cup season. That includes a silver medal in the final GS before the Olympics.