CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Mikaela Shiffrin finished off the podium. For a second consecutive race, Italy’s Federica Brignone owned it.
On a day that could have been ideal for a major statement from Shiffrin and shaken her out of her Olympic slump, Brignone, the irrepressible, 35-year-old Italian whose career was in jeopardy just months ago, made the biggest statement possible, collecting her second gold medal of the Olympics in front of a delirious home crowd in the giant slalom.
Brignone won the race for her second gold medal of these Games, a cap on a remarkable comeback after a severe leg injury suffered last April. Sweden’s Sara Hector and Norway’s Thea Louise Stjernesund shared silver, both finishing in 2:14.12. No bronze was awarded.
Shiffrin won this event eight years ago but has struggled with it in recent years, finishing in 11th place. Her result was the latest podium miss at the Olympics for the winningest skier in the sport’s history. Shiffrin has 108 World Cup wins across all disciplines but just two in 12 individual races during the last four Olympics, including this one.
After a day of wet snow Saturday, temperatures dropped overnight, and Sunday morning broke chilly on the mountain with a bright sky and good visibility. On both runs, Shiffrin was fast at the top but couldn’t maintain a speed to match the top of the leaderboard. On the first run, she lost ground as she came off a steep sidehill about midway through the course and then in a series of camel rolls ahead of the final jump.
The finish was an improvement from 2022 in Beijing, where Shiffrin crashed three times in six races, including in the giant slalom. After a series of injuries the past two seasons, she cut back her schedule to focus only on what she is best at for these Olympics — the slalom, giant slalom and team combined, in which she skied one run of slalom.
Nobody has been close to her in slalom. Her giant slalom performance is vastly improved from where it was last year and when this season started, but it’s unclear if it will ever get back to where it once was. On Sunday, in the finish area after the race, she spoke of the quality of the competition that landed her outside the top 10 but just three-tenths of a second off the podium.
“It is really, really cool that … we as athletes were able to showcase that on this day,” she said. “It was a beautiful day of racing, really good conditions, and sunny, and like one of those days you can really enjoy.”
The enjoyment, though, is different than what it used to be.
So far in Cortina, she hasn’t been able to break through as she did at the Olympics early in her career, when the attention and expectations were not as high as they are now, as she tries to again achieve greatness on the biggest stage.
She had the fourth-slowest slalom run in the team combined, causing her team to drop from first place to fourth. That race took place on a warm, humid, gray afternoon on soft, slushy snow, not ideal for Shiffrin, who prefers hard, dry tracks.
Shiffrin’s streak without an Olympic medal was extended Sunday after her 11th-place finish in the giant slalom. Her last podium finishi at the Games was in 2018. (Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)
Sunday was close to ideal, but Shiffrin has struggled in giant slalom since she crashed in the event in Killington, Vt., in November 2024. As she tumbled across the snow that day, either a gate or one of her poles stabbed her in the abdomen and nearly nicked her colon, which could have been a life-threatening injury. She missed about nine weeks of the season and had to essentially rebuild her core musculature.
When she came back, she described her vision growing foggy, as though her goggles were coated with a film. She couldn’t think clearly, she didn’t want to go fast. Shiffrin pulled out of the giant slalom at last year’s Alpine world championships. Her psychologist diagnosed her with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
With therapy and training, she slowly worked her way back into racing form. That said, she had described her relationship with giant slalom as a work in progress.
And she had been making good progress heading into the Olympics. In her last four starts in giant slalom, she finished sixth, fifth, fourth and third. Trend lines don’t get much better than that.
The Olympics, though, have become a challenge of a different order for Shiffrin. Her 11th-place finish was her second-worst in giant slalom this season, and it left her to find some positives away from the leaderboard, such as the intensity she had blasting out of the starting gate at the top of the second run, even if medals would be a whole lot more satisfying.
“It felt good to push, which was amazing, and I think that’s one of the reasons why it felt really good to ski high intensity,” she said. “Returning to GS racing, and I was so far off, I felt like there was no hope to be faster, and then to be here now, like within, just in touch with the fastest woman, that’s huge for me.”
Brignone’s stellar morning run knocked Shiffrin down to more than a second off the lead and ultimately into seventh place with one run to go. Heading into the afternoon, Shiffrin was going to need to ski fast and get some help from the skiers ahead of her to get close to the podium.
She got a bit, but not as much as she would need. There weren’t any obvious errors. She appeared in control from top to bottom. But she wasn’t on the limit either, and with more than a second to make up, that was what it might have taken for her to have a chance to get near the top.
She has one race left in her Olympic program, the slalom, which is scheduled for Wednesday. She has won seven of eight World Cup slalom races this season and already wrapped up the season championship.
Giant slalom was always going to be tough. Slalom is the event that is hers to lose, though — as other American stars such as Ilia Malinin and Chloe Kim have shown — at the Olympics, a fancy resume guarantees nothing.
Shiffrin has won slalom just about everywhere else. She won it at the Olympics 12 years ago. She plans to rest Monday, then train Tuesday.
Then comes Wednesday. Time for one last shot.
