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PARIS: American snowboarding star Mikaela Shiffrin will kick off her bid for extra World Cup dominance in Soelden on the weekend, the Austrian resort being the primary cease of a season that additionally options the Winter Olympic Video games in Beijing in February 2022.
Shiffrin gained the general girls’s World Cup title for 3 straight years to 2019.
However that streak ended with a horrible season marked by the sudden loss of life of her father in February 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and a again harm as she went winless for the primary time since her debut marketing campaign, 2011-12, when she was 16.
Final season she had three wins, one within the big slalom and two within the slalom, to take her World Cup tally to 69, which incudes one downhill and 4 in super-G.
Final season, Shiffrin centered on the technical occasions, the slalom and the enormous slalom, as she rebuilt following a nightmarish 2019-20 season.
Her profitable World Championships final February in Cortina d’Ampezzo, the place she completed on the rostrum in all 4 of her races and gained the mixed, might function a blueprint for the Feb 4 to Feb 20 Beijing Olympics the place she might win a 3rd consecutive gold in slalom.
However extra instantly urgent is the beginning of the World Cup season.
“I would be much more disenchanted if I had basically skied gradual or not stacked up for any of the World Cup races, however by some means gained a person or a number of medals on the Olympics,” Shiffrin mentioned.
“Luck sways the Olympic outcomes a lot greater than it does in any regular World Cup or while you take a look at the outcomes for all through a complete season.”
The World Cup circuit this season features a swing by means of Canada and the US, reinstated after they had been cancelled final 12 months due to the pandemic, for the primary time because the 1973-74 season.
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France’s Alexis Pinturault and Slovakian Petra Vlhova had been topped final season’s total World Cup winners.
Shiffrin will face a stiff problem within the technical occasions not solely from Vlhova but in addition Austrian Katharina Liensberger.
Liensberger beat Vlhova and Shiffrin to slalom gold on the earth championships in Cortina by a crushing margin, happening to win parallel gold and bronze within the big slalom.
The 24-year-old Austrian additionally gained the season finale in Lenzerheide by 1.24 seconds forward of Shiffrin.
The American, regardless of solely being two years her senior, has hailed Liensberger as main the brand new technology of skiers.
Both method, Shiffrin has mentioned she desires to attempt to additionally win in pace occasions this season.
“Ideally, I will be working an identical schedule to what I’ve had in years previous to final season, however we’ll need to see how that goes,” she mentioned.
She has her sights set on the report of 86 victories, all within the slalom or big slalom, set by Ingemar Stenmark of Sweden between 1974 and 1989. Solely compatriot Lindsey Vonn (82) has extra in girls’s racing.
On the boys’s facet, Pinturault claimed final season’s total on the again of smaller globes within the big slalom and parallel, changing into the primary French skier since Luc Alphand in 1997 to win the large globe.
Veterans Beat Feuz of Switzerland and Austrian Vincent Kriechmayr, who gained a pace double on the Cortina worlds, can once more be anticipated to bother the rostrum all through the season, with the boys’s stand-out downhill races approaching the latter’s dwelling snow within the famed resort of Kitzbuehel in January.
Switzerland’s Marco Odermatt and Austrian Marco Schwarz will certainly problem Pinturault in his quest for a back-to-back title.
After a season with races held behind closed doorways, Soelden’s Rettenbach glacier, at greater than 3,000m altitude, will once more welcome the general public, however following enhanced well being security protocols.
A possible headache awaits as a two-week quarantine beckons for these non-vaccinated skiers for 2 weekends in Canada (Nov 26-28, males; Dec 3-5, girls).
“The aim is to keep up all the World Cup calendar in all occasions,” an official from the worldwide ski federation (FIS) informed AFP.
“If nationwide laws grow to be too restrictive for entry into the nation for a majority of racers, the FIS will examine these case by case.”
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