Olympic skier Mikaela Shiffrin discusses being shaped by loss

Mikaela Shiffrin, who at 26 is perhaps the best alpine skier in American history, already has a few lifetimes worth of memorable wins under her belt as she heads into the Winter Olympics. But it is a loss she witnessed when she was a child that still sticks with her.

When she was 6 years old, the US hosted the winter games in Salt Lake City, where all-time great men’s skier Bode Miller already had two silver medals and was cruising towards a third in the slalom. All he needed was to complete a second attempt with a passable run to rack up a medal. Instead, the New Hampshire native went all guns blazing in an all-out play for gold, only to make an error on the course and lose his shot at a third podium. Miller hiked back up the mountain to finish out his run.

“Even at a young age,” Ms Shiffrin has said. “I could relate to that.”

Her career has shattered record after record, but she would need a whole lot of grit to keep going all the same—experiences she will carry as she represents the US in Beijing.

The lightning fast alpine skier, who competes across all events rather than specialising like many of her competitors, made her debut on the World Cup stage at 15, and has been notching unprecedented feats ever since. In 2014, at 18, she became the youngest Olympic slalom champion in history. With three Olympic medals, six world championships, and 73 World Cup races, she’s the most decorated American alpine skier in history, male or female. In 2015, she once won a World Cup race by more than 3 seconds, the largest margin of victory in nearly 50 years.

“Mikaela’s the best I’ve ever seen, male or female, in a few different categories,” Bode Miller himself told TIME. “She can do whatever she wants.”

Her success has been great, but it hasn’t been without equally great challenges. Being a child prodigy on the world stage, and a natural introvert at that, came with alienation, with people viewing her as some sort of freak of nature, describing her skiing as “cyborg-adjacent” it was so precise and skilled.

“I feel like [they] look at me and are like, Do we speak to it?” she told Sports Illustrated, who once dubbed her “the world’s most dominant athlete.”

Then there was the pressure that came from her outsized success. During the 2018 Olympics in South Korea, she won another two medals, including a gold in slalom, but still came in for criticism from some when she pulled out of the super-G and downhill categories, citing fatigue.

That alienation would only grow in 2020 when, her dominance atop the sport long since proven, her beloved father Jeff died in a freak accident at home in Edwards, Colorado. Mikaela wouldn’t ski for nearly a year.

“My family is heartbroken beyond comprehension about the unexpected passing of my kindhearted, loving, caring, patient, wonderful father,” she said at the time. “He taught us so many valuable lessons but above everything else, he taught us the golden rule: be nice, think first…This is something I will carry with me forever. He was the firm foundation of our family and we miss him terribly.”

Jeff Shiffrin, an anesthesiologist in Vail, Colorado, and former Dartmouth University skier himself, was a constant presence in the prodigy’s life in- and outside of skiing. He helped teach Shiffrin to ski in the driveway at age two, and was a constant presence at World Cup dates, known for trekking around the sidelines snapping photos of his wickedly talented daughter.

After spending weeks in mourning, she tried to return to competition in Sweden later that year, only to see the race canceled because of Covid. She was overtaken in the standings and lost the shortened 2019 - 2020 season.

She made her return to skiing that November, and embarked on a shaky comeback season, notching eight less World Cup podiums than the year before.

Still awash in grief, she pulled out of some events, citing the example of Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, who has withdrawn from some competitions to protect her mental health. That year, Shiffrin described feeling mentally vacant, blacking out while competing and forgetting what had just happened, wondering momentarily if she forgot how to ski. Perhaps most terrifying of all for a sport that involves whipping down a mountain at nearly 80 mph, she would get a sensation of darkness closing in around her field of view, obscuring the course before her.

“It’s not about settling scores,” she told the Olympic channel at the time. “I am angry that my dad died, I am angry how lonely I feel most days.”

The 2021 season proved difficult as well, with a back injury stalling her training in October and a positive Covid test doing the same in December.

But the “cyborg-adjacent” skier is returning to form, and is now back to number one in the world alpine women’s rankings.

She has credited embracing those complicated emotions that have accompanied her rise to the top of world sport. She has done everything from meditate, to read Sheryl Sandberg’s book on grief Option B, to write music, to see a sports psychologist, to raise money for the Jeff Shiffrin Athlete Resiliency Fund, a programme to support athletes undergoing adversity.

She would return to mottos questions her dad used to her as she worked her way through ascending levels of competition as a kid: “Are you happy?” “Is it fun?” And she’s making it a priority that the answer to those questions is yes.

“I finally feel like myself again,” she told The New York Times. “When a devastating thing happens, it’s like coming back from a significant injury. I hadn’t lost my ability or lost my fire, I was just healing, OK?”

During the Beijing Games, she was back to competing in all-five alpine ski races. But day one ended her defense of her giant slalom title - she crashed out after just five turns and was one of 22 skiers who did not finish on Xiaohaituo Mountain.

“The day was finished basically before it had even started, but I had really the right mentality and actually I am proud of those five turns. I mean huge disappointment, not even counting medals, but just it’s a really fun hill and good conditions,” CNN reported her saying.

“I think there’s a lot of questions that will be asked and I think many people are going to say: ‘What went wrong this entire time?

“We can go back to right after Sölden (World Cup event in October 2021) and rather than being able to train, being stuck inside because of a back injury. We can go to the 10 days I’ve had to take off in quarantine and missing training there.”

“We can go to a lot of different places in the season where we can put the blame, but the easiest thing to say is that I skied a couple of good turns and I skied one turn a bit wrong and I really paid the hardest consequence for that.”