Even in Defeat, Mikaela Shiffrin Shows Her Star Appeal

The two-time gold medalist laid bare her dismay immediately after suffering a rare crash in her opening event in Beijing.

BEIJING — Mikaela Shiffrin might go down as the best Alpine skier ever, but on Monday morning here she just went down, crashing 11 seconds and five turns into her first giant slalom run. It was so stunning that it was somehow more riveting than if she had won. The numbers say Shiffrin is dominant, and she is, but Shiffrin’s brain does not run on numbers. She is vulnerable and open about it in a way that so few all-time great athletes are. She has psychological challenges—she knows it, you know it and she knows you know it. So why run from it?

“I won’t ever get over this,” Shiffrin told reporters in the mixed zone afterward. “I’ve never gotten over any. I still remember how much it hurt to lose it four years ago in Kronplatz. I fell before the last Olympics and I remember thinking that was so heartbreaking. It wasn’t even at the Olympics.”

She had competed in 30 giant slaloms since that DNF at Kronplatz, Italy, completed all 30, and finished in the top seven 29 times. What just happened never happens. Except it did.

Shiffrin races again Wednesday in the slalom, the other event in which she has won Olympic gold. She will arrive knowing her entire Olympics probably hinge on that race. Alpine skiing is a fascinating mental test as it is—at its essence, it is a competition to see who can go fastest without crashing—and now it gets exponentially tougher for Shiffrin.

It can help to feel invincible. It can help to have a short memory. Neither of those applies to Shiffrin. She remembers every disappointment.

“I never get over it,” she said again. “And I won’t ever get over this, either. But I just have to put the pause button on really feeling the emotions or dwelling on it, because it just takes too much energy.”

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Shiffrin did not have to talk to us, and she sure did not have to talk like this. But she seems to realize that for her, the best way to move on is to acknowledge that moving on is hard. She put her disappointment on a table next to reporters’ recorders and let it breathe. Then she hugged fellow American Nina O’Brien and watched teammate Paula Moltzan on the big screen near the finish.

Shiffrin arrives at every race keenly aware of the expectations others have for her. She comes up with headlines faster than most copy editors. After that crash in Kronplatz, she said, “I can see it in my mind: ‘Mikaela Shiffrin faltering before the Olympics.’” This time, she rattled off what others might say before they could even say it.

“I think there’s just a lot of questions that will be asked,” she said, “and I think many people are gonna say, you know: ‘What went wrong this entire time?’ And we can go back to right after Soelden [in October,] and rather than being able to train, being stuck inside because of a back injury. We can go through the 10 days that I had to take off snow in quarantine and missing training there. We can go to a lot of different places during the season where we can put the blame. But I think the easiest thing to say is that I skied a couple good turns and I skied one turn a bit wrong and I really paid the hardest consequence for that.”

Daily Cover: Mikaela Shiffrin Is Focused on the Process

She refused to blame the artificial-snow surface: “I feel that it’s incredible.” She said the surface was less forgiving Monday than it had been in training, but conditions change. Skiers have to adjust.

“I spent a lot of time in my training, working on my technique and tactics to limit the risk of skiing out and crashing,” she said. “And you know, that wasn’t a very big crash. … It was not very exciting, which is good, actually.”

She laughed.

“I felt that I had, really, the right mentality,” she said. “And actually, I’m proud of those five turns, but yeah, I mean, there’s huge disappointment. Not even counting medals. That’s just a really fun hill and really good conditions.”

So now what? Her boyfriend, Norwegian skier Aleksander Kilde, said after finishing fifth in the downhill Monday afternoon, “It’s a pity to ski out in the race, but that’s also part of the game. I talked to her and she’s taking it well.”

Shiffrin said, “I’m not going to cry about this because that’s just wasting energy. My best chance for the next races is to move forward to refocus, and I feel like I’m in a good place to do that.”

The perception might be that she can redeem herself in the slalom and perhaps beyond. Well, that’s easy for us to say. Results are not erasable. Shiffrin will carry this disappointment with her no matter what she does the rest of these Olympics: “It just builds up and it never goes away, and I think that’s what drives me.” It is also what makes her captivating.