Mikaela Shiffrin was closing in on her 100th World Cup victory when her season took a violent turn. In the final stretch of a giant slalom run in Killington, Vermont, she leaned into the hill, lost an edge, and went tumbling through a gate before slamming into another and coming to rest in the safety netting. She was leading after the first run, chasing a milestone on home snow. But then, she left the hill in an ambulance with a wound no one could immediately explain.

A deep, three-inch gash that had sliced through her abdominal muscles and stopped just short of her colon. It was an injury almost unheard of in Alpine skiing, and one whose origin remains a mystery.

Her mother, Eileen Shiffrin, was watching from below. “She didn’t seem like she was moving,” she recalled. “The way

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