Mikaela Shiffrin finished second on her 26th birthday in the season’s penultimate slalom that complicated the title picture going into next week’s World Cup Finals.
Shiffrin, bidding for her 70th World Cup win, had the fastest first run but was denied victory by world champion Katharina Liensberger, who became the first Austrian woman to win a World Cup since Feb. 29, 2020.
Liensberger prevailed by .72 of a second, making up a deficit of .19 from the first run, to end a six-and-a-half-year drought between World Cup slalom victories for Austrian women.
Another significant result in Are, Sweden: Slovakian Petra Vlhova, who could have clinched the World Cup slalom season title on Saturday, finished eighth, her worst placement since 2019, after nearly skiing out in the first run.