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Alyssa Roenigk
Multiple Authors
CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — On Wednesday, Mikaela Shiffrin will enter the start gate of the Olympic slalom as the favorite for gold. On Sunday, she took a giant step toward that result.
Shiffrin was not expected to medal in Sunday’s giant slalom. Despite being the 2018 Olympic gold medalist in the event, and the all-time World Cup wins leader, Shiffrin only recently returned to a GS podium in January. Less than a year ago, she didn’t know if she would ever stand in another giant slalom start gate.
“After the injury last year and then returning to GS racing, I was so far off,” Shiffrin said Sunday. “I felt like there was no hope to be faster.”
That’s why her 11th-place finish in Sunday’s giant slalom felt like a win for the 30-year-old and why, all smiles in the mixed zone after the race, she called it “a beautiful day of racing.” Shiffrin skied smooth, tight lines with confidence and said she was pushing and “turning nervous energy into intensity and taking power from the course.” Her result was within a few tenths of the podium, a positive step in the right direction.
“To be here now, just in touch of the fastest women, that’s huge for me,” Shiffrin said. “I’m so proud.”
Fifteen months ago in November 2024, Shiffrin crashed in a GS race in Killington, Vermont, on a day she was attempting to win her 100th World Cup title at her home race. She slid off course and into the safety nets and, once in the ambulance, medics realized she had been impaled in her abdomen, likely by the slalom gate she crashed into. Her physical recovery from the injury was grueling. Her mental journey back to racing took longer.
Shiffrin has spoken openly about managing her struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder as she fought her way back. In an essay for The Players’ Tribune last May, she wrote that after the crash, her mind and body had become disconnected — the ski racing equivalent of the “twisties.”
“You absolutely need to be able to trust that what you see happening in your mind is fully connected with what you then do with your body,” she wrote. “If that connection is off … the danger level increases exponentially.”
Shiffrin began to find her footing again through therapy and exposure — and by letting go of the outcome. When she stopped caring about times, podiums or medals, fear began to loosen its grip. In January, she finished third in a World Cup giant slalom, her first podium since the crash.
And then she came to the Olympics, where expectations and pressure are unavoidable and unlike on the World Cup circuit, another opportunity comes only once every four years. The first week of these Games alone have seen several top athletes succumb to the pressure, including Shiffrin, who finished 15th of 18 racers in the slalom leg of last week’s team combined, squandering the lead her teammate, Breezy Johnson, had built after the downhill.
That’s why on Sunday, she said she was taking only positives from her performance in the GS, an event she hasn’t raced consistently since her injury. “I was like, I don’t know, maybe I’ll never race GS again,” Shiffrin said. “And here we are, in a totally different position, and it shows that you can fight.”
Wednesday’s slalom will be different.
The slalom is Shiffrin’s best event. Seventy-one of her record 108 World Cup wins have come in the slalom — more than any skier in any discipline ever — and this season alone, she has won six of seven starts and already clinched her ninth slalom Crystal Globe.
But Shiffrin has a rocky relationship with the Olympics. She’s a two-time Olympic gold medalist, yet she hasn’t earned a medal in her past eight Olympic starts. For Shiffrin, as for most ski racers, success has been punctuated with crashes, injuries, setbacks and comebacks, as well as big wins in big moments when the world is watching.
At 18, she became the youngest Olympic slalom champion in history in Sochi. She hasn’t won Olympic slalom gold since.
In Pyeongchang, she left with giant slalom gold — and disappointment.
In Beijing, she unraveled. Expected to medal in at least three of the six events she raced, she medaled in none.
“I don’t want Beijing to be the reason that I’m scared of the Olympics,” Shiffrin told Olympics.com last fall. Shortly before arriving in Cortina, she recorded an episode of her podcast in which she talked about coming to terms with an awareness that “the Olympics are not designed for the comfort or to prioritize performance of the athletes and teams competing.”
The season after her disappointing Beijing Games, Shiffrin broke the World Cup wins record. She suffered injuries over the next two seasons, has been unstoppable in the slalom this year and has had a confounding start to her fourth Olympics.
Even for the greatest of all time, success is not linear.
On Wednesday, Shiffrin has two runs to trust her mind and her body — and to trust herself to be the best in the world. She said she and her team had a “really wonderful” session of slalom training and that she’s heading into her final race with more knowledge of what it takes to ski fast on this course, and with a new mentality.
“There were a lot of turns where I was quite quick on the team combined day, and a handful where there was just a misalignment,” Shiffrin said. “And then my mentality was not matching the day. So I’m going into [Wednesday] with my eyes open that we can see a very similar situation [to last week]. And I will try to handle it differently.”
On Wednesday, handling it differently might mean more than gold.
