Mikaela Shiffrin after a run at the FIS Alpine Ski World Cup on Dec. 6, 2019 in Lake Louise, Canada.
One day after settling for a 10th-place finish in the women’s downhill, two-time Olympian Mikaela Shiffrin attacked the Lake Louise, Canada, course with determination Saturday.
Shiffrin placed second in the FIS world cup race, adding another podium finish on the course where she won her first downhill race in 2017 and first super-G race in 2018.
Shiffrin, who is the world cup overall points leader, nearly grabbed her 63rd career world cup win, finishing just 0.13 seconds slower than winner Nicole Schmidhofer of Austria. She was faster than Schmidhofer at several points in her race, but had a slower finish.
Schmidhofer won in a time of 1:49.92 on a day that featured two crashes and several race interruptions. Shiffrin, capturing her 88th world cup podium, completed her run in 1:50.05 in the 12th run of the afternoon. Italy’s Francesca Marsaglia won bronze in 1:50.35.
The podium finish was the fifth in six world cup races this season for Shiffrin, who has won both of her races in slalom. She has reached the podium in three disciplines already this season, and she’ll go after another top-three finish Sunday in the first super-G race of the season.
Shiffrin has piled up four podium finishes in the last three years at Lake Louise, including first- and third-place finishes in the downhill in 2017.
Alice McKennis, a two-time Olympian, finished 10th and Alice Merryweather, a 2018 Olympian, finished 11th.
Paul D. Bowker has been writing about Olympic and Paralympic sports since 1996, when he was an assistant bureau chief in Atlanta. He is a freelance contributor to TeamUSA.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.
