When Mikaela Shiffrin’s 100th victory arrived Sunday, it looked like so many others that Shiffrin has collected over the past dozen years.
Her head goes back, her poles go out wide and up in the air, and underneath the goggles, there’s this infectious look of joy and surprise, even after all these years and all these wins.
But this one wasn’t like any of the others. It came nearly three months after she suffered a puncture wound in her abdomen during a violent crash in Vermont, and less than two weeks after she pulled out of a race because, strange as this may sound, the greatest skier in history was scared to go fast.
The delayed coronation though, didn’t make it any less sweet, maybe even more so. Shiffrin finally collected her record 100th World Cup win in Sestriere, Italy, about 4,000 miles from the ski school where, some 20 years ago, she began to morph from a gifted child into an all-time great. No Alpine skier has won more races than Shiffrin, allowing her to stake her claim as the best in the sport’s history.
But on the long road to her 100th win, Shiffrin may have accomplished something even more groundbreaking — in her sport and plenty of others. Over the last year and a half, Shiffrin, at the very top of the game, has built a support team dominated by…
