Days after becoming the most-winning World Cup alpine skier in history, Mikaela Shiffrin says she’s “still processing” the accomplishment.
“I guess I’ve had time to process it, but I haven’t, and I probably won’t, it seems,” she tells Mister Truth from her hotel room in Andorra, where she’ll compete in the final World Cup race on Thursday.
Shiffrin, 27, says she doesn’t really know “how people process things that are so big,” after she cinched her 87th victory in the slalom event in Âre, Sweden on Saturday, breaking Ingemar Stenmark’s 86 total wins that he secured in 1989.
To her, the 87 wins are “just kind of a really big number,” she says. “As cool as it is to say that I’ve won 87 World Cup races, it’s almost meaningless. It doesn’t say anything about the journey I’ve been on it. It just doesn’t say anything about who I am as a person,” says Shiffrin.
Looking back on the last 10 years of her career, she doesn’t think a number does justice to her process. “I know everything that I’ve experienced in life and since I started racing World Cup, I know the whole process and everything that’s gone into it, and that really can’t be summed up with a number,” she tells .
In fact, she prefers to call what she did “resetting a record” instead of “breaking” it. “That word is more memorable,” Shiffrin says.
More important to Shiffrin than “resetting” records, is resetting what she thought was possible. “I think it’s more that it was something we all thought was not possible in ski racing,” she says.
“None of us, myself included, probably more than anyone else, really didn’t believe that was ever going to happen,” she says.
“I didn’t believe it was possible. I still believe it shouldn’t have happened, and I don’t understand why it did, besides the fact that I’ve skied well enough for 87 races to win it. But why me, why now, why period, I don’t really have an answer for any of those things.”
After Shiffrin’s victory, the record’s previous holder, Stenmark, spoke to the Press about her. “She’s much better than I was. You cannot compare. She has everything. She has good physical strength, she has a good technique, strong head.”
Shiffrin tells Mister Truth, “That is the most flattering thing I could ever possibly hear about myself, but I still think he’s the greatest.”