Twelve years ago, under a black night sky in the Caucasas Mountains north of Sochi, Russia, 18-year-old American Mikaela Shiffrin skied to a gold medal in the Olympic slalom. She was precocious — the youngest U.S. Alpine ski racer to win a gold medal (or any medal at all) — but also preordained, a prodigy whose future was laid out years earlier when she was an adolescent star at a ski academy in Vermont, schooling much older racers, set on fast rails toward greatness. That night, German skier Maria Reisch, who had won four Olympic medals, including two in those Games, spoke for the chorus: “She will definitely win many, many races.” Surely that would include many, many medals. At the bottom of her winning run, Shiffrin skied a wide arc around the finish corral and raised her arms into the air; her father, Jeff, put down his ever-present camera and screamed for joy, tears filling his eyes and running into his salt-and-pepper mustache. It was the beginning.
Shiffrin won another Olympic gold medal in the slalom on Wednesday afternoon, this time in the beautiful and ancient village of Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Italian Dolomites. She became the first Alpine skier to win golds 12 years apart (whether in the same event or others). And after being the youngest American to win a gold, in Sochi, she’s now the oldest, at age 30. (Not the oldest from any nation; Italian Federica Brignone, 35, has won two golds at these Games). It was Shiffrin’s fourth Olympic medal, the most by an American skier; and her third gold, ditto, although her first in eight years, and those eight years are the spine of her story.
This time she did not skate a wide, joyful arc in the corral; she drifted slowly and then fell to her knees and dropped her head toward the snow, as if in supplication, which in effect she was. Four years ago in Beijing, she failed to complete her first runs in slalom and giant slalom, and her slalom run in the Alpine combined. She did not earn a medal in six races, a stunning performance from an athlete acknowledged as the best in the world. Thus her story was re-written on the fly as a tale of struggle — and failure — against expectation and pressure. That is partly fair. Shiffrin said after her victory, “I have an ever-evolving relationship with expectations.”
With those expectations and that pressure piled ever higher in Cortina, she skied a shockingly slow slalom in the two-person combined event and finished 4th with downhill winner Breezy Johnson. She was 11th in the giant slalom, in which she has slowly come back from an injury a year ago, and was just a medal contender, not a favorite. Nevertheless, it was all incongruous: Shiffrin arrived in Cortina with 108 World Cup victories, 23 more than any other skier, and a preposterous 71 wins in slalom. Away from the Games, she was a winning machine; at the Games, the distance grew from her last medal.
But it wasn’t just a story about expectation and pressure. It was also a story about love and loss, about grief and absence, about a change so big that it can’t be defeated. Jeff Shiffrin died in the first week of February in 2020, in an accident in Colorado, while Mikaela and her mother/coach, Eileen, were on the circuit in Europe. Like so many sports families, the Shiffrins were a team, bound together by frenetic schedules, shared understandings, and by love. Jeff was the first person to tell Shiffrin to ski in arcs, not the pizza wedges taught to most toddlers. To teach the beauty of the perfect turn. To chase process, not medals, from which medals flowed. She has missed him since, and it was inescapable that until Wednesday, Shiffrin had not won an Olympic medal since her father died. In Beijing, after skiing out of the slalom, Shiffrin said to reporters gathered at the bottom of the hill, “Right now, I’d really like to call him, so that doesn’t make it easier. So I’m pretty angry at him, too. He would probably just tell me to get over it.” It was right there to see.
