American teenager Mikaela Shiffrin won the last World Cup slalom race of the season here on Saturday to also snatch the discipline's Crystal Globe from Slovenia's Tina Maze. With her fourth World Cup win of the season, the 18-year-old Shiffrin thus added the globe to her world championship success in Schladming last month. Maze could only finish third in this race, just 35 hundreths of a second behind Shiffrin, and thus saw her globe dreams evaporate.

Overall World Cup winner Tina Maze claimed her tenth victory of the season in Sunday's slalom with Swiss Wendy Holden second and Mikaela Shiffrin of the United States third. Slovenia's Maze was the fastest over the two runs with a winning time of 1min 52.85sec with Holden at 0.25sec back and Shiffrin, the world slalom champion, at 0.75sec off the pace. ryj/ak

By Manuele Lang OFTERSCHWANG, Germany, March 10 (Reuters) - Tina Maze won her duel with world champion Mikaela Shiffrin in a women's World Cup slalom on Sunday to keep her chances alive of scoring a grand slam of crystal globes this season. Led by her young American rival in the morning run, the Slovenian overall runaway leader fought back in the afternoon to snatch her 10th victory of the World Cup season, her second in a slalom.

Mikaela Shiffrin confirmed her status as the most promising prodigy in women's alpine skiing when she shelved her school homework for long enough to win the world slalom crown. The sporting precocity of the 17-year-old, however, is not something she says has been born from merely landing at the right place at the right time. It has been long planned by a supportive, hard-nosed family whose interests were rooted in skiing and the advancement of their daughter from nappies and kids' plastic skis into a fully-blown, professional ski racer.