Minnesotan skier Paula Moltzan takes a big step toward earning a spot at the 2026 Winter Olympics

NEW YORK — With a little more than three months to go before the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy, Alpine skier Paula Moltzan of Prior Lake checked a significant box in pursuit of a second Games.

She opened the World Cup season with a second-place finish in the giant slalom in Sölden, Austria, on Oct. 25. It was her best career result in the event and had the added bonus of making her path to the Olympics easier.

Most of the 11 women on the U.S. Alpine team are selected based on World Cup results, with a top-3 finish being the top criterion.

“I’m not going to say I’m qualified, but I’ve met one of the criteria markers for the Olympics for Alpine skiing in the first race,” Moltzan said Wednesday in a news conference at the Team USA Media Summit. “It’s definitely like a weight of pressure off of my shoulders.”

She acknowledged she was thinking about the Olympics in the start gate in Sölden as the ski season began.

“It’s been prevalent in everybody’s mind,” said Moltzan, 31, who learned to ski at Buck Hill, first getting on the snow at age 2 thanks to parents who were instructors at the Burnsville ski area. “It’s an Olympic season, and there’s four spots in GS and there’s at least six of us that could qualify for it. So you’re aware, you want to get it off the table, you want to make sure that you’ve lined up your ducks in a row.”

That this first duck in the row came in giant slalom, not slalom, might be considered a surprise because, she said, “I wasn’t a GS skier a handful of years ago.”

But it was a third-place finish in giant slalom at the world championships in February in Saalbach, Austria, that Moltzan said was a turning point for her as a giant slalom skier.

“I’ve always been known as a slalom skier, and so to be able to get that medal in world championships kind of reaffirmed that I belonged in the space,” she said.

Three of her four podium finishes in calendar-year 2025 have been in giant slalom. And now she thinks her first World Cup win will be in that discipline.

“I am a GS skier,” she said. “I now identify as one, which is good. I feel like I finally belong. I feel like I had a bit of impostor syndrome in GS for the longest time ever.”

She credits training with the deep U.S. team of giant slalom skiers. In Sölden, six American women were in the top 20, and they had five of the top seven fastest second-run times.

She also watches a lot of video to study technique and tactics, particularly out of the start gate. She pays attention to Swiss skier Marco Odermatt because, she said, “the way in which his body moves down the hill, it looks so natural and he’s never fighting gravity.”

“In GS,” she added, “I’ve learned to carry my skis more down the hill rather than across the hill like in slalom.”

Moltzan isn’t settling for checking just one box for the 2026 Games, which are Feb. 6-22 at various sites in northern Italy around Milan and Cortina. She said she wants to ski at least two events, if not three, including the new team combined event that features one downhill skier and one slalom skier. (Those happen to be the three events American Alpine star Mikaela Shiffrin has said she plans to focus on, too.) Skiers will be evaluated during World Cup events through Jan. 18, with the Olympic team named shortly thereafter.

Moltzan has put off thoughts of retiring after this Olympics and says she believes “this season is the season I would like to see myself on the top step” of the World Cup podium.