(CNN) Mikaela Shiffrin won her seventh gold medal at Alpine World Championships on Thursday after winning the giant slalom in Méribel, France, in the Alps.
The American brought her cumulative record to 13 medals from 16 career world championship races, making her the most successful skier of modern times.
She is now two medals behind Germany’s Christl Cranz’s record of 15 medals, which she won in the 1930s when the races were held every year instead of every two years as they are now.
“It’s incredible,” Shiffrin said after the race. “I was so nervous, my god.
“Today I really saw how I lost my nerve. My heart is going crazy, I feel like I’m going to faint.”
After taking a commanding lead in heat one, Shiffrin dropped to 12th in heat two, finishing the race with an overall time of 2:07.13, just 0.12 seconds ahead of Italy’s Federica Brignone.
Relief was written all over the 27-year-old’s face after a few difficult years at major events. Shiffrin is competing in her first major event since last year’s Beijing Olympics, where she went five races without a medal and three of those races.
She missed her first race at the World Championships before taking silver in super-G and then gold in giant slalom.
Her win also came a day after her longtime coach, Mike Day, left her team. Day, who had coached Shiffrin for seven years and 65 of her 85 World Cup victories, decided to leave the team after Shiffrin informed him she would be moving to a different staff at the end of the season.
“It was definitely a high level of stress those days,” Shiffrin said. “It was very, very difficult today to stay focused and keep the intensity at the right level.
“One thing I really want to say is just ‘thank you’ to Mike for seven years – I can’t even say he’s helped me – he’s been such an integral part of my team and has been there to see me through some of the incredible moments of my career and some of the most challenging moments of my career and also my life,” added an emotional Shiffrin.
Shiffrin has one more event at the World Championships when she competes in the slalom on Saturday.