The Alpine World Cup season opens this weekend with a giant slalom on the Rettenbach Glacier above Sölden, Austria, on October 24–25 — and the US women arrive with a target on their backs.

Last year at this race, the American team put six skiers in the top 19, led by Paula Moltzan's podium finish, with Mikaela Shiffrin fourth and Nina O'Brien sixth. That depth carried through the entire 2025–26 season and delivered the women's Nations Cup to the United States for the first time. Shiffrin and Moltzan alone racked up 16 World Cup podiums across slalom and giant slalom.

Shiffrin's story this season is giant slalom. The discipline where she crashed at Killington in 2024, suffering a serious abdominal injury, has become a rebuilding project — and a successful one. She climbed from 30th to fourth in the GS standings last season and says she wants to find out how far she can take it. Meanwhile Moltzan, 32, starts her eighth World Cup season with new backing from VAN DEER-Red Bull Sports, the brand founded by Marcel Hirscher, and a role developing a new line of women's skis.

Behind them sits a hungry supporting cast. O'Brien, 28, is still hunting her first World Cup podium after a career-best fifth in GS and a standout Olympic second run. AJ Hurt is back in the GS top 10 after rehabbing a hip injury, Katie Hensien returns from a fractured tibia aiming to repeat her 2024 fourth place at Sölden, and 21-year-old Elisabeth Bocock — a world junior GS silver medallist — rounds out the group. Their pre-season was a scramble for decent snow across Europe, Chile and New Zealand, with Chile delivering both training runs and a memorable powder-and-apres day at Tío Bob's in Portillo.

For ski fans planning a trip around the race calendar, there's also practical news: the confusing streaming mess is over. Every alpine World Cup and world championship race streams live on Peacock this season, plus a free YouTube and FAST channel called Ski & Snowboard World Cup — no more stacking three subscriptions. And if you want to see it in person, Sölden in late October is a spectacle in itself: a glacier race at 3,000-plus metres, a big festival crowd, and the Tyrolean ski season officially opening weeks before most resorts.

Even casual travellers with no interest in race results have reason to care — this opener sets the tone for a winter where the US women, fresh off their historic Nations Cup, could dominate again.