-
Alyssa Roenjek
Multiple authors
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy – On Wednesday, Mikaela Shiffrin will enter the starting gate of the Olympic slalom as the favorite to win the gold medal. On Sunday, she took a giant step toward that outcome.
Shiffrin was not expected to win a medal in the giant slalom on Sunday. Despite being the 2018 Olympic gold medalist in the event, and the all-time World Cup wins leader, Shiffrin only recently returned to the GS podium in January. Less than a year ago, she didn’t know if she would one day be standing in the starting gate of another giant slalom.
“After the injury last year and then coming back to GS racing, I was pretty far along,” Shiffrin said on Sunday. “I felt like there was no hope of being faster.”
That’s why her 11th-place finish in Sunday’s giant slalom was a win for the 30-year-old, and why everyone in the mixed zone was smiling after the race, as she called it a “beautiful day of racing.” Shiffrin skated smooth, tight lines with confidence and said she was pushing and “converting nervous energy into intensity and drawing power from the track.” Her result was just a few tenths away from the podium, which is a positive step in the right direction.
“To be here now and connect with the fastest women is great for me,” Shiffrin said. “I’m very proud.”
Fifteen months ago, in November 2024, Shiffrin crashed in a GS race in Killington, Vermont, on a day she was trying to win her 100th World Cup title at her home race. She slid off the track and into the safety nets, and once in the ambulance, paramedics realized she had been stabbed in the abdomen, likely by the slalom gate she had crashed into. Her physical recovery from the injury was grueling. Her mental journey back to racing took longer.
Shiffrin spoke candidly about managing her struggles with PTSD as she struggled to make her comeback. In an article for The Players’ Tribune last May, she wrote that after the accident, her mind and body became disconnected — the ski racing equivalent of “twists.”
“You definitely need to be able to trust that what you see happening in your mind is completely related to what you next do with your body,” she wrote. “If that connection is broken… the risk level goes up dramatically.”
Through therapy and exposure, and through letting go of consequence, Shiffrin began to find her footing again. When I stopped caring about times or podiums or medals, fear began to loosen its grip. In January, she finished third in the World Cup giant slalom, her first podium finish since the accident.
Then came the Olympics, where the expectations and pressures are unavoidable and, unlike the World Cup circuit, another chance only comes once every four years. The first week of these Games alone saw several top athletes succumb to the pressure, including Shiffrin, who finished 15th out of last week’s team’s 18 slalom finishers combined, squandering the lead that teammate Breezy Johnson had built up after the downhill.
For that reason, she said on Sunday that she was only taking positives from her performance in the GS, an event she has not raced in consistently since her injury. “I was like, I don’t know, I’ll probably never race a GS again,” Shiffrin said. “And here we are in a completely different situation, and it shows that you can fight.”
Wednesday’s slalom will be different.
Slalom is Shiffrin’s best event. Seventy-one of her record 108 World Cup victories have come in slalom – more than any skier in any discipline ever – and this season alone, she has won seven out of eight starts and has already claimed a ninth slalom Crystal Globe.
But Shiffrin’s relationship with the Olympics is tense. She is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, but has not medaled in her past eight Olympic appearances. For Shiffrin, as for most ski racers, success has been punctuated by accidents, injuries, setbacks and comebacks, as well as big wins in big moments under the eyes of the world.
At 18 years old, she became the youngest Olympic slalom champion in history in Sochi. She has not won an Olympic gold medal in slalom since.
In PyeongChang, she left with giant slalom gold and disappointment.
In Beijing, it collapsed. She was expected to medal in at least three of the six events in which she competed, but she did not medal.
“I don’t want Beijing to be the reason I’m afraid of the Olympics,” Shiffrin told Olympics.com last fall. Shortly before arriving in Cortina, she recorded an episode of her podcast in which she talked about coming to terms with the realization that “the Olympic Games are not designed to comfort or prioritize the performance of the athletes and teams competing.”
In the season following the disappointing Beijing Games, Shiffrin broke the record for most World Cup wins. She struggled with injuries over the next two seasons, was unstoppable in the slalom this year and had a confusing start in her fourth Olympics.
Even for the greatest of all time, success is not linear.
On Wednesday, Shiffrin has two rounds to trust her mind and body, and trust herself to be the best in the world. She said she and her team had a “really great” session of slalom training, and that she heads into her final race with greater knowledge of what speedskating on this course requires, and with a new mindset.
“There were a lot of turns where I was too fast on the combined team day, and a few turns where there was a misalignment,” Shiffrin said. “Then my mentality wasn’t fitting for today. So I’ll go into (Wednesday) with my eyes open so we can see a very similar situation (to last week). I’ll try to approach it differently.”
On Wednesday, it may mean dealing with more than just gold.
