This is Mikaela Shiffrin’s most impressive season yet. She broke Marlies Schild’s record for most lifetime slalom wins. She became first skier, male or female, to win World Cup races in all six alpine disciplines. And the first one to claim the World Championship title in any single discipline four times in a row. So…

It’d be almost exhausting if it weren’t so preposterous: Mikaela Shiffrin has done it again. With the close of the World Ski Championships in Åre, Sweden, she’s broken another record. Hit another personal best. She’s still just 23 years old. And she’s done it with an approach to her craft, and her competitions, that…

Watching Lindsey Vonn at the end of Sunday’s downhill race in Are, Sweden, her smile dazzling, her arms spreading into a victory V, bowing half-humorously to the cheering crowd, one thought occurred to me: It’s been a while since we’ve seen Vonn smile this big in the finish area. That thought was followed by another,…

Lindsey Vonn is the most decorated female skier in history, and the most decorated skier, man or woman, in U.S. history. She’s also the athlete whose motto is “If you fall, pick yourself back up.” And with good reason. It isn’t just that she’s fallen, a lot. It’s that each time she picks herself back up, she doesn’t…

Before today, Marcel Hirscher had never won Olympic gold. Somehow.

Since Sochi, the women’s ski racing field has undergone a serious shake-up. Sure, the men have had some big-name retirements since 2014 (Bode Miller, Ivica Kostelić, Mario Matt, Benjamin Raich). But the women were practically swept of their previous all-stars: As they hit 30 (or came close), an entire generation of…

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: ski racing is an insanely exciting sport. And not (only) because of the crashes.

Writing about Mikaela Shiffrin’s success would be getting boring—if her narrative arc weren’t continually getting more dramatic. Back at the Sochi Olympics, the story was how the then-18-year-old kept her nerve after flubbing a turn and won slalom gold. Later that year, it was how she’d mastered slalom, won her first…

Mikaela Shiffrin looked tired. She wasn’t arcing as smoothly in this, her last race of the season; she wasn’t fighting as much. The fact that even that performance at Aspen on Sunday still put her in sixth—one many athletes on the World Cup circuit would love to have, yet considered a lackluster one for Shiffrin these…

ST. MORITZ, Switzerland — If you wanted to script the most fitting, the most unnerving-yet-uplifting race to cap off the two-week World Alpine Ski Championships, you couldn’t have done better than today’s men’s slalom.

ST. MORITZ, Switzerland — With a line-up like today’s, it’s easy to make the mistake of predicting the podium.

ST. MORITZ, Switzerland — There was a crash today at the men’s giant slalom in the Alpine World Ski Championships, but it wasn’t a racer that hurtled to the ground. It was a cable camera, its wires severed by a too-close flyover from the Swiss Air Force. That was frightening enough, but it was just inches from true…

“The first time I was at the start I was really scared,” says former ski racing phenom Didier Cuche at the beginning of the documentary STREIF: One Hell of a Ride. “All of the guys are making jokes in the evening. They’re saying, ‘Don’t unpack too much your stuff, because I don’t want to pack for you tomorrow if you…

The 2015 World Ski Championships have had some historic firsts. The first World Champs to be held in the U.S. this century. The oldest women's winner (Tina Maze, 31, downhill). And then the oldest World Champs winner, period (Hannes Reichelt, 34 downhill). The first skier to win the same discipline in three straight…

Late into a giant slalom run that looked like it would clinch her second gold in the 2015 World Ski Championships, Anna Fenninger suddenly snowplowed.

Shortly after his run, just before mounting the most important podium of his career—and the first World Championships downhill podium for the U.S. since 2005—Travis Ganong was already thinking of powder. In particular, the two feet of powder that had hit the slopes at home in Lake Tahoe the night before. "I've dreamed…

Tina Maze made history yesterday, and not just as the first world champion to double as a Slovenian pop star. At 31, she's now the oldest female skier to have won gold in a Championship event.

At the World Championships downhill events that started today—the women raced this morning, the men tomorrow—it all comes down to a minute and a half. That's about how long it will take most of the racers to come screaming down more than 8,000 feet of steeps that reach up to a 34-degree gradient.

The sky over Beaver Creek's Birds of Prey course was bluebird-bright, the grandstand was stuffed with 3,500 people screaming their lungs out, and Bode Miller–Olympic medalist, self-taught skiing dynamo and great divider of opinions–was in the starting gate.

Mikaela Shiffrin's style is sure-footed and rhythmic. Like the best slalom skiers, she sets up her turns high. She thinks a few turns ahead. And Shiffrin—who in Sochi last winter became the youngest racer ever to win Olympic gold in slalom and who thus spent several days as a cheery, effervescent staple of NBC…