Inside Mikaela Shiffrin’s journey to a golden Olympic redemption

This is the story of how Shiffrin dodged all the psychological landmines that the Olympics threw at her to achieve the result that the public expected from the woman who is far and away the winningest skier in the sport’s history. Only winning would allow her to escape the criticism she so feared, even if it was going to come from people with little understanding of her or her sport.

“They just don’t think that I have to do work anymore to be good at slalom,” said Shiffrin, who has won a record 73 slalom and 110 overall World Cup races in her career. “Actually, I’m that good at slalom because I do work constantly every single day. I do not ever settle or rest.”

Shiffrin had been working with psychologist Abbey Fox for years, ever since her struggles in Beijing, but especially during the previous six months as the Milan Cortina Games approached. In one exercise, Fox would have Shiffrin write the word “Olympics” on a piece of paper over and over, and then write down the emotions that it conjured.

A lot of those emotions centered on Shiffrin’s fear of being criticized again. Sometimes, the simple act of writing the word would make her cry. So together, she and Fox worked to figure out the emotions behind those tears. Many of them had to do with Shiffrin’s father, Jeff, an early ski mentor and her biggest fan, the guy who was always in the finish area with his camera, who died from an accident in the family home in Colorado in 2020. There was a question Shiffrin needed to confront:

“Maybe I don’t want to win an Olympic gold medal when he is not here?” she said.

Was winning a way to honor his memory? Would winning another Olympic gold medal, eight years after he had watched her win her last one in South Korea, simply be too painful when he’s not alive to experience it with her?

“Maybe it feels like another level of accepting a world where he’s dead, and I don’t want that,” she said.

Who would?

But then, she also wanted to win. Desperately. Shiffrin may be gracious in defeat, but she is a fierce competitor. She decided that working through all the hard stuff to get to the Olympics, when the spotlight was brightest, would make her dad proud and honor his memory in its own way.

She knew the Olympics were going to throw curveballs at her that might knock her out of sync. If she was going to have any chance at achieving her goal, her team was going to have to get her back on track. She’d told them all this during a meeting at a training camp in Chile in September. Sometimes, they were going to have to tell her things she might not want to hear.

Five months later, Shiffrin headed to Cortina on a hot streak unlike any skier had before. She’d won seven of the season’s eight slalom races and come in second in the other one by a hair. Almost nothing and no one could beat her.

Austria’s coaches seemed to have other ideas.

Even before the Olympics started, something felt a little off about Cortina to Shiffrin. As she drove into the city that is a playground for Italy’s aristocracy, where she has competed and trained during so many seasons, Shiffrin’s eyes kept focusing on the light blue color scheme everywhere she looked. The usual red of a World Cup venue that carries so much familiarity and comfort was gone. It made the place feel far more foreign than she expected.

In a news conference, she was asked how it felt to compete for the U.S. as protests raged over a surge in aggressive deportation operations and the recent killing of two civilians in Minnesota by federal agents. She shared a quote from Nelson Mandela:

“Peace is not just the absence of conflict; peace is the creation of an environment where all can flourish regardless of race, colour, creed, religion, gender, class, caste or any other social markers of difference.”

She was criticized on social media from the right and the left, for being both too woke and not confrontational enough. And with that, she turned off her social media feeds and tried to focus on the task at hand.

The Olympics had started to deliver their surprises. She sensed more were on the way and thought she knew where one might be coming from.

In Alpine skiing, coaches for the top nations set the course for the technical events, slalom and giant slalom, rather than neutral officials. This gives an advantage to the skiers whose coaches are setting the gates for a given race, as they can be placed to emphasize the skills of that country’s skiers.

The advantage is especially pronounced in women’s Alpine, where coaches and skiers find out weeks in advance which coaches are setting the gates for the most important races. Those coaches can then train their skiers for the patterns they will see on race day. They can also insert patterns that they think will cause problems for their rivals.

Two and a half weeks before the Olympic slalom races, Austria won the slalom lottery. There would be three slalom runs at the Olympics, one in the team combined, and two in the slalom event. Austria’s Robert Berger was selected to set the slalom course in the team combined. Another Austrian coach, Klaus Mayrhofer, was selected to set the slalom course in the first run of the individual race.

The Austrians had set the course in the final slalom race ahead of the Games, too, in Špindlerův Mlýn in the Czech Republic, also known as Czechia. They had thrown in a series of straight sections that force skiers to pick up speed and then quickly pivot laterally.

Shiffrin is the best turner in the world, but speed can frazzle her, especially since her crash in a giant slalom race in Vermont in 2024 that sidelined her for nine weeks. For Shiffrin, though, this wasn’t just a personal issue. To her, slalom skiing is about the turns. It’s not about swooshing through tricky sets of straight gates.

“I just don’t believe that that’s the right tactic,” Shiffrin said. “I feel like you set technically challenging courses because it’s a technical event and let the best athlete win. And don’t try to make tricky situations where your athletes are going to win.”

Markus Aichner, a spokesman for the Austrian team, said the courses the Austrian coaches set were in accordance with the world governing body for skiing, FIS, and approved by its officials.

“Every coach is free to practice such courses in training and then apply them in a World Cup race — this applies equally to Mikaela’s coaches as well as to those from Austria, Italy, or Switzerland,” Aichner wrote in an email.

Regardless of how the course had been set, Shiffrin knew she was in trouble as soon as her skis hit the snow on Feb. 10 in the team combined. She’d spent the morning in the team hotel, watching the downhill portion of the competition. Johnson, Shiffrin’s partner and the gold medalist in the downhill, had staked her to a narrow lead. Shiffrin, the best slalom skier in history, likely just had to ski average to get them onto the podium.

But then Shiffrin and her coaches got on the course for inspection. The day had turned warm. The snow was turning to slush, creating the sort of conditions on which Shiffrin had barely practiced in months. As they slipped sideways down the course, she and her coaches kept pushing piles of wet, sloppy snow off the track.

“It was just like, if they don’t get enough salt on this to really pull it together or find a way to bind this together, we’re just water skiing,” Shiffrin said.

Going up in the chairlift with Shiffrin for the race, Regan Dewhirst, her physiotherapist, noticed that Shiffrin was showing signs of nerves. Her sentences were short. Her breathing sounded shallow.

But then, as they went through their warm-up routine of neurocognitive drills, Shiffrin seemed like her normal self. Dewhirst asked her how she was feeling.

“She was like, ‘I’m good, I’m nervous, but it feels like a normal race,'” Dewhirst recalled during a recent interview.

Then Shiffrin pushed out of the starting gate, and her skis hit the slush. Soon, she’d confront those straight sets of gates. She was pretty sure she knew why they were there — to trip her up and give an advantage to the Austrians, who had likely been practicing the pattern for weeks.

Aichner said the course was not anything Shiffrin could not handle.

“Mikaela performs at an exceptional level,” he said. “She is not the most successful skier of all time without reason.”

Shiffrin crossed the finish line and didn’t want to look at the scoreboard. When she finally did, the numbers were ugly. She was 14th out of 18 slalom skiers. She and Johnson tumbled from first to fourth. The Austrian team of downhiller Ariane Rädler and slalom racer Katharina Huber had won.

“It wasn’t indicative of the level of skiing that she’d shown all season or all the hard work that she’s put in, that the team had put in,” Karin Harjo, Shiffrin’s coach, said in an interview.

They went back to the hotel, ate a quick dinner, and found a room to figure out what had happened. Fox, Shiffrin’s psychologist, was by her side. She’d been there throughout the Games, working overtime, as Shiffrin put it. A long night lay ahead.

That night, when Johnson broke into the meeting to deliver Shiffrin her marching orders, Shiffrin and her team had concluded what had happened that day.

“The most key piece was understanding that it was one set of circumstances, one day, one result, one run, and it doesn’t define her or the team or all the work that we’ve put in,” Harjo said.

Now it was time to get back to work, and get in some work they hadn’t done in a while. Cortina can be frigid one day and feel like the sun-splashed Italian Riviera the next. No one knew what the weather was going to be like in eight days for the slalom race, but if it was warm again and the snow was soft, they wanted to be ready for it.

Because the winter in Europe had been mostly cold, she’d had just one day of training on soft snow since the offseason. They needed another one.

First, though, they needed rest. They had scheduled it for the next day, and they were determined to stick to the plan, even if all Shiffrin wanted to do was put on her boots and practice turns in soft snow.

“Resting is the hardest thing to do for any person,” Harjo said. “But it’s also kind of the key piece for success, because then the next day, you’re able to go and produce and perform at a higher level because you rested.”

After an early bedtime, it was time to hit the hill again. They waited until the middle of the day, when the sun was high and the snow was soft. After speaking with her technical specialists, Shiffrin decided to use a ski that she hadn’t used in months because it responded best in the conditions she had to confront.

Shiffrin skied as many as eight runs that afternoon. She hit them hard, taking fast and aggressive lines through the gates. Harjo set the gates to try to mimic those tricky, straight, fast Austrian patterns.

“She just did it over and over and over again and got the confidence of like, ‘OK, if we see this again for the real slalom, I’m ready, I’ve been exposed to it, I know how to handle it,'” Dewhirst said.

First, though, Shiffrin had the small matter of another Olympic race to deal with, the giant slalom. She had struggled with the speed of the race since the crash in Vermont at the start of the 2024-25 season that left her with a serious puncture wound in her abdomen.

When she returned to the World Cup two months later, she battled symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s been improving all season and had landed on the podium in the giant slalom at a World Cup race two weeks before the Olympics. A medal seemed within reach.

Race day delivered hard, fast, clean conditions. Shiffrin put down two mostly clean and aggressive runs. She was sixth after the first run. She finished 11th.

She knew there might be another round of criticism coming her way. She didn’t care. She felt like she’d skied maybe her two best giant slalom runs of the season, but the competition was better. She’d finished out of the top 10, but she was just three tenths of a second behind bronze medalist Thea Louise Stjernesund of Norway.

It would have been so easy to toss her skis across the snow. What was it going to take for the best skier in the world to win an Olympic medal?

But her head wasn’t in that space. There’d been a lot of quality on the mountain that afternoon. She was right there with the top giant slalom skiers in the world. Under those circumstances, 11th was just fine.

To some, it sounded like glass-half-full positivity taken to the extreme. But it was her truth. And now it was time to get ready for the slalom.

After another day of rest and then a practice day, Dewhirst met Shiffrin in the gym at 5:45 a.m. the morning of the slalom. Shiffrin waltzed through the doors, her eyes bright and alive. She asked Dewhirst how she’d slept. Dewhirst knew at that moment this was going to be a good day.

“She’s up on her toes and smiling,” Dewhirst said of Shiffrin. “You could tell the weight of a normal race day was on her, but she was very present and just excited to be there.”

Shiffrin carried that energy onto the hill, even as the nerves eventually arrived. Fox had given them some tricks to deal with those.

Dewhirst, who always accompanies Shiffrin to the start, kept asking her what she could see and hear and feel, bringing her back into the moment. Shiffrin kept firing back answers on another sparkling Cortina morning that was cold enough to keep the snow dry and hard.

Harjo knew the first run, with the Austrian setup, was going to be the big challenge. The day before, Harjo and the other coaches had found an extra bundle of gates and an open part of the slope for Shiffrin and her U.S. teammates to practice on something like the straight setup Shiffrin was sure she would confront in the slalom. Harjo reminded Shiffrin that she’d done the work and had her plan.

“Go and enjoy this,” she told Shiffrin on race day, “the joy of competing and the joy of knowing that you’ve done everything within your power to prepare for this moment.”

That was all Shiffrin needed to hear. Her first run was more than a second faster than Camille Rast of Switzerland.

After a break, Shiffrin went back to the top of the hill for her second run. As she waited to start, Shiffrin, as she often does, lay down in the snow and tried to sneak in a quick nap. She put her bib over her eyes. Dewhirst saw her lying there and figured she’d fallen asleep.

She hadn’t. Beneath the bib, there were tears.

It was going to happen. She was going to win an Olympic gold medal, and her dad wasn’t going to be there to share it with her. When she rose, Dewhirst put her through the paces to get her ready to compete and delivered some last words of encouragement.

Then Dewhirst watched as Shiffrin pushed hard out of the gate, made her first few turns, and disappeared around a corner. She hustled over to Shiffrin’s ski technicians, who were watching her times at each interval on a phone to see whether her lead was growing or shrinking.

They could have closed their eyes and known what happened from the roar that shot up the mountain as she danced down the slope. Shiffrin crossed the finish line 1.5 seconds ahead of Rast. In the end, it wasn’t even close.

Shiffrin crouched to her knees for a few moments of quiet reflection. After eight years and just under 100 seconds of ski racing, she was an Olympic gold medalist again.

How had she done it?

Six weeks and a cappuccino later, Shiffrin spoke with the satisfaction of a boxer who had landed the ultimate knockout punch.

“We were getting to the point where it’s like, you’re just trying to trip people up, and I start to take that personally a little bit,” she said of the Austrians’ tactics. “Do you think that I don’t know how to figure out how to see this combination? Do you think I don’t have the experience to figure this out and memorize that course? Like, who are you trying to hurt here?”

They’d come after the GOAT on the biggest stage. Once more, the GOAT had won.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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