Mikaela Shiffrin scores another milestone in dead-heat win

CNN  — 

It was a dead heat with her nearest rival, but Mikaela Shiffrin continued her assault on the record books by joining Swiss great Vreni Schneider in third on the all-time list of women’s World Cup winners.

Shiffrin and Slovakia’s Petra Vlhova were inseparable over two runs of a foggy giant slalom in Maribor, Slovenia to hand the American her 12th win of a record-breaking season.

The victory – also Vlhova’s fourth this term – took Shiffrin’s overall tally to 55 World Cup wins alongside Schneider, with Austria’s Annemarie Moser Proell (62) in second behind retiring American Lindsey Vonn (82).

Shiffrin and Vlhova clocked a time of two minutes 31.31 seconds to beat Norway’s Ragnhild Mowinckel by 0.93 secs.

The 23-year-old Shiffrin was 0.48 secs quicker than Vlhova on the first run, but made a mistake on the lower part of the course in run two to slip back into a tie.

“It was a fight in the second, I almost lost it at the bottom so it’s always nice when you have this luck,” Shiffrin told FIS Alpine.

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This season, Shiffrin has become the first skier – male or female – to have won 15 races in a calendar year.

And she is now three wins short of the record of the most wins in a single season – Schneider won an unprecedented 14 races in 1988-89.

Shiffrin is bidding for a third straight World Cup overall title and leads Vlhova by nearly 600 points in the season standings.

She is also chasing a fourth straight slalom world title at the World Championships in Are, Sweden later in February.

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The 23-year-old Vlhova has pushed Shiffrin hard this season, but has ended as runner-up six times.

“All the time we are really close but today we can share first place so I’m happy,” Vlhova told FIS Alpine.

Dead heats are rare but not exceptional in skiing. At the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, Slovenia’s Tina Maze and Swiss Dominque Gisin shared downhill gold after clocking the same times.