MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. — Alone in the darkness just before sunrise, Mikaela Shiffrin sleepily trudged up a snowy knoll toward a single light illuminating the hut where she would change into her ski gear. It was the first day of May last year.

A month earlier, Shiffrin, 22, had won the women’s World Cup overall title, a grueling, 41-race competition that officially crowned her as the best women’s skier on the planet.

Except many in the ski community thought otherwise, and Shiffrin knew it. Her doubters considered her a specialist who won the title by piling up victories in her best event, the slalom, the safest of five Alpine events.

Fearless risk-taking is what gives ski racing its sizzle, and fans of the sport have always saved their greatest reverence for daredevils who perilously charge down a mountain at 80 miles an hour in aptly named races like the downhill. It is how Lindsey Vonn, widely viewed as the greatest women’s racer ever and the skier against whom Shiffrin has been compared all her life, made her fame.