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Nobody has won more ski races than Mikaela Shiffrin, but her performance at the Olympics has not matched her success elsewhere. Four years ago, she left the Beijing Games empty-handed after failing repeatedly in her signature events. And now, at the Winter Games in Cortina, she's already missed out on one medal. But her road isn't over yet. NPR's Becky Sullivan reports.
BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Mikaela Shiffrin is only 30 years old, and already she has won 108 World Cup races - nearly two dozen more than the guy in second place. Yet, there's no mincing words. The 2022 Beijing Olympics were, for her, a disaster.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #1: But here goes Shiffrin. Can she keep this clean?
SULLIVAN: In the giant slalom, she slid out 11 seconds in.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #1: At these Games. (Shouting) Shiffrin is out. It's gone.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #2: (Speaking French).
SULLIVAN: In the slalom, she lasted only five seconds.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #1: And she's gone again. And Shiffrin, same mistake as the giant slalom.
SULLIVAN: Afterwards, she sat on the slope, her head buried in her knees.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #3: Wow. No words there. Goodness me. Poor, poor Shiffrin.
SULLIVAN: In the combined, she survived her downhill run just to crash out again in the slalom.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #1: (Shouting) There's the mistake. And she's - no. Oh, no. She has done it again.
SULLIVAN: Every announcer from every country was stunned at what they were watching.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #1: Serious psychological issues and problems for Shiffrin.
SULLIVAN: It was one of the biggest stories of the Games - an epic collapse by the sport's biggest star that had the world asking, what happened to Mikaela Shiffrin?
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MIKAELA SHIFFRIN: I was pretty naive to the - oh, the bigness, the vastness of it.
SULLIVAN: It wasn't always this way for Shiffrin. This was once easy for her.
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SHIFFRIN: I really felt like ski racing is simple. It's a start and a finish line and some red and blue gates in-between.
SULLIVAN: Shiffrin opened up about all of this on a recent episode of her podcast, called "What's The Point?" Her first Olympics was in Sochi back in 2014. She was just 18 years old.
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SHIFFRIN: I remember feeling like - people had explained the Olympics like it's this big, unmanageable storm that's coming your way, and how are you going to weather the storm? And I kept thinking, what is everybody talking about? This is going to be so great.
SULLIVAN: That year, Shiffrin won the gold medal in the slalom - the youngest person ever to do it. After that, she was a celebrity.
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SHIFFRIN: I got to hug my parents, and then it was (laughter), like, an immediate running the gauntlet of just probably 72 hours straight of interviews and celebrations.
SULLIVAN: The spotlight was shocking.
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SHIFFRIN: You know, all of a sudden, these people had opinions. And it wasn't just about how I performed in sport. It becomes opinions about how you look, the clothes you wear, the way you laugh.
SULLIVAN: At the 2018 Games, her legend only grew as she won two more medals - a gold in giant slalom, a silver in the individual combined. Then, in early 2020, as she was leading the World Cup standings for the fourth year in a row, her father, Jeff Shiffrin, fell off the roof of their family home in Colorado. He died in the hospital soon after. Shiffrin rushed home to sit with him as he was taken off life support, as her mom, Eileen Shiffrin, later recalled.
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EILEEN SHIFFRIN: It was a week she couldn't even get out of bed. She couldn't eat. She couldn't drink anything and lost a lot of weight.
SULLIVAN: In a short documentary released this month by Shiffrin's sponsor Adidas, Eileen described that dark time. Skiing had always been something the Shiffrins had done as a family. Jeff was a Dartmouth racer, Eileen a masters-level skier herself. They'd taught Mikaela and her brother to ski when they were tiny. Jeff coached her, accompanied her on the circuit, always with a camera around his neck - a proud dad.
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SHIFFRIN: I didn't think Mikaela would ever ski again. I don't think she thought she would, either.
SULLIVAN: In the end, Shiffrin's break from racing lasted almost a year. She returned to the circuit that November, but she wasn't OK, she said on her podcast, which she taped just a few weeks ago.
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SHIFFRIN: And it didn't show up in obvious ways. It didn't show up in, like, extreme sadness. On the anniversary of my dad's passing, it was, like, we had a great day of training, and then that made me - that put me in an emotional state that, like, had nothing to do with the training, but I thought it did.
SULLIVAN: But the Olympic clock stops for no one. As the Beijing Games drew near, Shiffrin had reclaimed her spot atop the World Cup standings, which sent expectations for her soaring.
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SHIFFRIN: And when I was in Beijing, I had hoped to be able to put everything else in my life on pause and just power through the events. And I just couldn't.
SULLIVAN: Shiffrin said her performance there still haunts her.
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SHIFFRIN: Honestly, this was something that I've been unpacking for years, to this day, still trying to understand certain pieces of Beijing entirely outside of results and performance.
SULLIVAN: For Shiffrin, who has always been deeply thoughtful and sensitive, the negative publicity, the headlines filled with words like nightmare, failure, collapse, choke - it was suffocating.
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SHIFFRIN: I did experience a very dark side of that level of viewership because of Beijing. And I can't unexperience that.
SULLIVAN: She now says that experience was a catalyst for what she calls, quote, "indescribable personal growth." Soon after those Games, she started working with a psychologist who helped her process her grief.
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SHIFFRIN: That growth has impacted my life within sport in a way that I really just can't explain.
SULLIVAN: Since Beijing, she's had some of the best moments of her career, like becoming the winningest skier of all time with her 87th World Cup victory in 2023. She's also had some of her worst moments, too, including a frightening crash in a giant slalom race in Vermont in 2024, in which she hit a slalom gate and punctured her abdomen. To keep going, she's had to learn to be an entirely different kind of ski racer - one for whom success means something besides just winning races.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #4: Shiffrin in the hot seat. Expectation reaches (ph)...
SULLIVAN: Last November, I went to see Shiffrin ski in a World Cup race in Colorado to see how her journey was coming. Her first slalom run was the fastest of the day. Her next put her ahead of the field by more than a second and a half. That's an eternity, by the way. It's like winning by 30 in a basketball game.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #4: Mikaela Shiffrin, the master. Let her hear you.
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SULLIVAN: This season, she's been on fire. She's won seven of this year's eight World Cup slalom races and finished second in the other. But while she makes the slalom look easy, it hasn't felt easy, she told reporters this week.
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SHIFFRIN: Those gates come fast, you know what I mean? Like, whoa. I don't know. It feels like Whac-A-Mole, except for you're the mole. And you don't want to be the mole. You want to be whacking.
SULLIVAN: On Tuesday, in the Olympic team combined event, every eye in Cortina watched as she came down the hill. Her teammate Breezy Johnson had recorded the fastest downhill time. When it was Shiffrin's turn to ski the slalom, she didn't crash or miss a gate. She was just slow. She just couldn't find the right execution, she said today. She and Johnson ended up in fourth place - another Olympic event with no medal.
But Shiffrin has two more races to go - the giant slalom on Sunday and the slalom on Wednesday, in which she's the favorite. So the jury is still out on which she is this time - the whacker or the mole. Heartbreak and victory live right next door, she said in a statement today. Either way, she added, she feels grateful and excited to be here at all.
Becky Sullivan, NPR News, Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy.
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