“If you go to a race, you get two runs down a course that day. If you stay home and practice, you get 12 or 13 runs down the course that day.”

This philosophy led to winters in which Shiffrin would enter only 11 races, a small sum for an accomplished academy racer, but she still won every available junior title. When Shiffrin was 13, her family returned to Vail Valley, where they still reside. But Shiffrin continued to attend Burke, and at 14, she went to Italy for the de facto world championships for 13- and 14-year-olds. She won that race by more than three seconds.

Vonn had been the first American girl to win that title. Now the skiing world had another athlete whom people started calling the next Vonn.

Staying Grounded

By 15, Shiffrin had made her first World Cup start; by 16, her first World Cup podium. Each time, she returned to Vermont to study and train. She is determined to graduate with her Burke class in June.

“When she returns from the World Cup, she talks to all of us about the experience on the first day back,” said Pech, Shiffrin’s roommate. “But when I wake up the next morning, all her stuff in our room is put away and arranged exactly like it was before she left. She goes to class, she trains and she never brings the World Cup up again.

“You can’t pry it out of her. She wants to hear about our lives and our races.”

Thomas Walsh, another junior national-level racer who has been a close friend of Shiffrin’s since they were Vail preschoolers, said he has known since elementary school that his friend would be a top World Cup racer, but not just because she was gifted on skis.

“There is a purity to her dedication that makes you know she is going to succeed,” Walsh said.

Walsh was told he had a type of bone cancer called Ewing’s sarcoma in 2009, just before he was to accept a full scholarship to attend Vermont’s Green Mountain Valley School. He faced multiple operations, months in a hospital, chemotherapy and more than a year of treatments with an uncertain outcome.