After an inexplicable Olympics, Mikaela Shiffrin faces an uncertain future
Shiffrin didn't medal in any of her five single events, failing to finish in three of them.
YANQING, China – She is a virtuoso pianist who can’t find middle C, Rothko but now colorblind, LeBron standing under the basket missing dunk after dunk after dunk. Mikaela Shiffrin understands her story line at the Beijing Games, right down to her final individual run in Thursday’s Alpine combined. She went into it after a solid downhill performance poised for what has eluded her here: a single medal.
Here she is, speaking for all of America, setting up a Thursday afternoon slalom in which she should feel like a trout in a brook.
“Hey, she did a pretty good downhill run,” Shiffrin said, in her best Everyday American voice, assessing her chances. “Set up pretty well for the slalom. And there’s no chance – like, come on. . . . She’s going to at least make it to the finish. This could be the medal that salvages after all.”
She transformed back into herself. There was no medal. There was no finish.
“Right now, I just feel like a joke,” she said. “So . . . yeah.”
There’s no pre-Olympics bingo card that included the following results for Shiffrin: DNF for did not finish in the giant slalom; DNF for did not finish in the slalom; DNF for did not finish in the slalom portion of the combined. She has won Olympic medals in all three events. She leaves here without even crossing the finish line in any of them.
Thursday, she made it 10 gates before a bauble, and by the 12th she was on her right hip – out after 10 seconds of a run that should have gone more than 50. By that point, it was some combination of completely astonishing and somehow expected.
In her 91 races before these Olympics across the elite World Cup circuit, world championships and the PyeongChang Games, Shiffrin has two DNFs. In five races here, she had three. A month ago, a disappointing experience here wasn’t wholly out of the question, both because Shiffrin’s training was interrupted by a 10-day quarantine for a positive coronavirus test and because she is so open about her struggles with expectations.
But three DNFs in races she is accustomed to dominating . . . well, if you could have found a Vegas bookie to take those odds, good luck.
And so this is a search for an explanation. Give Shiffrin a shot first.
“I don’t really understand it,” she said. “And I’m not sure when I’m going to have much of an explanation, and I can’t explain to you how frustrated I am to not know what I can learn from the day.”
Not just the day. The entire two-week stay. Shiffrin was open about her ambivalence toward the Olympics as recently as last fall. She likened the pressure at the Games to a monster that couldn’t be kept at bay. From the outside, it would seem to have consumed her whole here.
“I think you want . . . to be able to say it’s a pressure thing,” Shiffrin said. “There are certainly points during the Games where I felt the weight of pressure and expectation. But in general, when I was racing, it wasn’t the case. That wasn’t something outrageous. And it certainly wasn’t more than I ever experienced in my career before. . . .
“The pressure’s there. It’s always there. And I don’t feel uncomfortable or even unfamiliar with it.”
She is like all of us, fishing for the precise reason why – at one of the most important points in her career – she was unable to perform the basic skills that provide her foundation. Sheer stage fright would be one, right? And yet Shiffrin won gold in slalom as a teenager in Sochi, gold in giant slalom four years later in PyeongChang, silver the following week in the combined to conclude that competition. So does she shrink from the Olympic moment? Her past would show that’s not the case.
So the combined seemed to be an opportunity. After the downhill portion, she was fifth. But the four women ahead of it were all speed specialists; they had combined for zero career World Cup slalom starts. Shiffrin had an advantage over her stiffest competition: Switzerland’s Michell Gisin and Wendy Holdener, who won gold and bronze to sandwich Shiffrin’s silver in South Korea, and Italy’s Federica Brignone. Plus, she felt normal, calmer.
“I wanted to ski a good, solid run of slalom,” she said. “It was not actually so much to ask for from myself.”
Not so much to ask from herself before she arrived here. A monstrous task in her current state. And yet as she built into her run at the top of the course, she felt her strong skiing come out. She cleanly got through the fifth turn – which, coincidentally, felled her in both the GS and the slalom. A rhythm briefly began to take hold.
For Mikaela Shiffrin, skiing slalom is essentially breathing. It’s what she does. Inhale, exhale.
“Any time I’ve ever been so sure about something like that, in my entire career, welp . . .” she said of how she began Thursday’s run, pausing, “it’s gone pretty well. The track record is . . .”
The track record is 47 World Cup victories in slalom, more than any man or woman in any Alpine discipline ever.
“At least what I can say is with that kind of feeling on my skis,” Shiffrin said, “I never DNF’d.”
Until Thursday. Shiffrin now has two track records: the one from here, and the one from everywhere else.
“I should probably just quit,” she said. She was joking. I think.
Shiffrin plans to ski in Saturday’s parallel team event, but that’s not the medal – not the medals – she came here for.
“I’m certainly questioning a lot,” she said. “I’m really disappointed, and I’m really frustrated.”
Forget Saturday’s team event. Mikaela Shiffrin will be a fascinating figure going forward. She will either find a way to divorce herself from what happened here, or she will be consumed by it. The Olympics end, but the World Cup season continues. Will Beijing wreck that, too?
“I think we’re going to have to wait and see,” she said.
A transformation happened here, from Shiffrin as a sure thing to Shiffrin questioning it all. She turns 27 next month. What defines her doesn’t have to be what happened here. What defines her could be what happens next.
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