Before Mikaela Shiffrin equalled Annemarie Moser-Pröll on six overall World Cup titles at Hafjell, she had to settle a different piece of business: another slalom crystal globe. The American clinched her ninth slalom win of the 2025/26 season — and the 110th World Cup victory of her career — on the eve of the giant slalom finale, and her words after the race made clear how she sees the silverware piling up around her.
"This is just a symbol of the work that my team has been putting in," Shiffrin said after sealing the slalom standings. There is no swagger in the formulation; the American has spent most of her late career deflecting solo credit toward a coaching staff and family network that have managed her schedule through illness, injury and the death of her father in 2020.
The slalom globe itself is becoming a piece of routine for Shiffrin. Hafjell extended a stranglehold over the discipline that now reads like a record book in its own right. Her nine slalom wins of the season came against a field that included Camille Rast — herself second in the slalom standings, with one of the most measured assessments of the year.
"My Slalom season was quite amazing, I mean I was the only one faster than Mikaela one time," Rast said, summing up the discipline's current pecking order with disarming honesty. The Swiss racer's runner-up globe is, by any objective measure, the only realistic insurgent campaign anyone has managed against Shiffrin's slalom dominance this season.
Emma Aicher, the rising German GS-slalom prospect, took third in the deciding slalom race at Hafjell and offered the kind of quote that captures where she is in her career. "It's pretty fun, didn't think I would be able to be on the podium again today," Aicher said.
Shiffrin used her time on the deck to look ahead, but only carefully. "This season has been so exciting, quite like a whirlwind with all the wonderful races," she said, with the energy of an athlete who has not yet fully processed what she has just done. Hours later, she would clinch the sixth overall title that tied Moser-Pröll's record.
The slalom story is also a generational one. Shiffrin has competed against three different waves of slalom challengers — first the Slovak-Czech axis of Šárka Strachová and Petra Vlhová, then Wendy Holdener and Mikaela Kirchgasser, and now the post-Vlhová wave of Rast, Aicher and Lara Colturi. None has been able to crack her grip on the standings.
With the 2026/27 schedule already partly mapped, the next milestone is obvious: a seventh overall World Cup title, which would put her clear of Moser-Pröll on her own. The slalom globe, almost taken for granted now, will sit underneath that bigger goal as the most reliable building block in her season. "I'm actually not confident at all, you saw today anything can happen," Shiffrin said as she looked toward the giant slalom finale. The records that followed suggested she had nothing to fear.
