SEMMERING, Austria — Mikaela Shiffrin was fourth and more than half a second off the pace in the opening run of a women's World Cup slalom Sunday, putting the American's five-race winning streak in the discipline in danger.
Shiffrin posted the fastest second split time and was one-hundredth ahead of world champion Camille Rast halfway down the Panorama course but lost considerable time on the Swiss racer in the bottom section and finished 0.54 seconds behind.
Rast led Italian-born prodigy Lara Colturi, who competes for Albania and was 0.09 seconds back in second, and Austria's Katharina Liensberger, who trailed by 0.34.
''It's a pretty tough one. I think, probably, a little bit like overskiing, too round, compared to what's possible," Shiffrin told Austrian TV, adding she planned to analyze video footage of her own and Rast's run before the final leg later Sunday.
"Imagine like Camille, she is so direct on the gates, if she manages that, what must be, then it's so quick, so fast, so down the hill,'' the American said.
Shiffrin won the final race of last season and then dominated the first four slaloms of the current Olympic campaign, winning them by an average margin of 1.5 seconds.
Shiffrin, who was the 2014 Olympic champion and holds the women's World Cup record of 68 slalom wins, has won the slalom in Semmering three times, most recently in 2022 after she had won back-to-back giant slaloms in two days in the resort near Austrian capital Vienna.
Shiffrin led second-placed Colturi by 180 points in the slalom standings coming into Sunday's race. The World Cup schedule includes three more slaloms in January before the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, and then two in March.
