Mikaela Shiffrin opens Alpine skiing World Cup season, live on Peacock

Mikaela Shiffrin begins what could be her busiest Alpine skiing season in years, perhaps ever, at the traditional opening race, a World Cup giant slalom in Soelden, Austria, on Saturday, live on Peacock.

The first run streams live at 4 a.m. ET. The second and final run is at 7:05 a.m.

Shiffrin, who won this race last season, eyes adding to her total of 74 career World Cup victories. She ranks second in history behind Swede Ingemar Stenmark (86 wins) and American Lindsey Vonn (82).

Shiffrin last raced a full season in 2018-19, when she won a record 17 times. Since, she has become more comfortable with the speed races of downhill and super-G and could race those disciplines more than ever this season.

But first, she tries to tame the Rettenbach glacier and better a field of accomplished women on Saturday. That includes reigning Olympic GS champion Sara Hector of Sweden and past world GS champions Tessa Worley of France and Petra Vlhova of Slovakia.

The men race in Soelden on Sunday, also live on Peacock (4 a.m. and 7 a.m.). Swiss Marco Odermatt is the defending winner and the favorite. River Radamus, sixth in Soelden last year and fourth in the Olympic GS, will look to deliver the first U.S. men’s podium in Soelden since 2015.

OlympicTalk is on Apple News. Favorite us!

It was early last spring that Rafael Arutyunyan, the longtime coach of Nathan Chen, met with Roman Skorniakov, who mentioned that his son, 17-year-old American Ilia Malinin, wanted to land a quadruple Axel, the lone four-revolution jump yet to be done cleanly by any figure skater in competition.

The 65-year-old Arutyunyan, who has worked with Malinin part-time, assured Skorniakov, a 1998 and 2002 Olympic skater for Uzbekistan, that Malinin’s triple Axel was