PARIS:

and Marco Odermatt kick off the alpine skiing World Cup season at the Austrian resort of Soelden this weekend, with one eye firmly focused on the Winter Olympic Games in Milano-Cortina in February.

Shiffrin, whose 101 World Cup wins are the most of any skier in history, won slalom gold in Sochi in 2014 as an 18-year-old, and then triumphed in giant slalom in Pyeongchang four years later.

But at the last Olympics, in Beijing in 2022, she failed to finish both of her favoured slaloms and left without a medal.

Shiffrin, who sustained a debilitating puncture wound in a crash last November, insisted this week that her skiing was still "a work in progress".

"It's been an incredible journey to work from the end of last season, where I had a total mind-body disconnect, to where I am no

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