The sporting GOAT you may not have even heard of

There was no hiding Mikaela Shiffrin’s disappointment at last year’s Beijing Winter Olympics. The American – already a double Olympic champion – arrived in China with five alpine skiing medals on her radar, but crashed out after a combined 17 seconds in her opening two events before finishing ninth in the super-G and 18th in the downhill.

‘‘I don’t know how to handle it,’’ she said, fighting back the tears after getting caught on the inside ski and missing the fifth gate in the slalom. ‘‘It makes me second-guess everything over the last 15 years – everything I thought I knew about my own skiing and slalom and racing mentality. I feel really bad.’’

Eleven months have since passed and this week Shiffrin made history by claiming her 83rd and 84th World Cup wins in Kronplatz, Italy, taking her past Lindsey Vonn’s all-time women’s record.

Having levelled Vonn’s mark in Slovenia this month she stormed to victory by 0.45sec then 0.82sec in the two giant slalom events for her ninth and 10th wins of the season. She is now only two victories shy of Ingemar Stenmark’s all-time record (86).

A graphic run by the American television channel NBC Sports in the aftermath of Shiffrin’s recordequalling victory put her career into context. It compared her number of starts, victories and win percentage with the greatest athletes from a selection of other individual sports.

There seems an eternal debate about where the likes of Tiger Woods, Serena Williams and company stand in the GOAT (greatest of all time) debate, but at the top of the tree on NBC’s chart – and by a fair distance – stood Shiffrin.

Updated after her first win this week, her record is 237 races, 83 victories, a 35.02% win rate.

Comparing statistics between different sports is, of course, problematic. The fields are vast in golf and they play over four days (or at least they should); winning a grand slam tennis tournament requires a fortnight of consistency and against seven opponents or more; while there is much to be said for the split seconds and centimetres that separate athletics titles.

However, that Shiffrin’s win percentage is almost 13% higher than that of Woods is astonishing.

‘‘It’s incredible. She’s always been a talent, from this young child who everyone invested a lot emotionally and financially in, and she delivered,’’ Chemmy Alcott, the four-times Winter Olympic skier, told The Times after Shiffrin’s 83rd win.

‘‘She’s very vulnerable, as we saw at the Olympics last year, and she’s gone through a horrendous time with her father passing away [aged 65 after an accidental fall at home in 2020]. It’s just such a fairytale.’’

What makes Shiffrin so impressive is that the majority of alpine skiers tend to focus on only a couple of disciplines because of the varying physical and technical demands of each format.

The speed, length of course and size of turns in downhill demand that athletes have more power, muscle mass and know how to let the ski run, for example, while a slalom skier traditionally has a slighter build with more finesse for shorter turns.

Shiffrin, however, competes in all of them – and successfully. In winning her first super-G race at Lake Louise, Canada, in 2018, she became the first alpine skier to triumph in every World Cup discipline – downhill, super-G, giant slalom, slalom, combined and parallel slalom.

The young Swiss skier Marco Odermatt has been lauded over the past three seasons for similar versatility, but even he falls shy of

Shiffrin’s all-round skill and dominance.

‘‘It’s like Roger Federer’s backhand: when it was on form, he didn’t need power because he had so much finesse with it. Mikaela is the same,’’ Alcott said of Shiffrin, who has won 12 World Cup season titles – four overall, six slalom, one giant slalom and one super-G – and leads this season’s overall, slalom and giant slalom standings once again.

‘‘It’s like her brain is in her feet and she doesn’t have to think when she skis. She just has these sensors under foot that mean that whatever the terrain, whatever the discipline – whether it’s a 10m-radius turn or a 100m-radius turn – she knows when and how to apply the pressure, and that’s just remarkable.

‘‘I think she will smash Stenmark’s record this winter with the freedom of knowing that she is now the greatest female ski racer of all time, and I really believe that she will get to 100 wins by the end of her career.’’

It seems entirely possible. Vonn, a loyal supporter of her compatriot Shiffrin, took a total of 395 World Cup races to reach 82 wins before she retired after numerous injuries at the age of 34. Shiffrin – who originally burst on the scene as an 18-year-old by becoming the youngest Olympic slalom champion (male or female) at Sochi 2014 – surpassed that mark after 237 races, and she is only 27.

The next goals will be Stenmark’s record and the world championships in Meribel and Courchevel next month, but with plenty of years left in the tank and the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics coming in 2026, Olympic redemption may also lie around the corner.