NEW YORK — It’s early afternoon Tuesday, and Mikaela Shiffrin is sitting at the bar in a midtown Manhattan hotel, sipping tap water and noshing on shoestring fries — and talking about getting back onto the snow very soon.
She’s five days removed from finishing her injury-interrupted season with her record-breaking 101st World Cup win, in the slalom at the World Cup finals at the Sun Valley Resort in Ketchum, Idaho. She should probably be trying to figure out what time she’s going to fall asleep on a deserted beach this afternoon.
Instead, Alpine skiing’s greatest-ever skier is juggling some strength and aerobic workouts along with media and sponsor obligations, then flying to Austria for three days with her fiancé, Aleksander Kilde, the Alpine champion of Norway, before she zips back home to Colorado to get a little more time on the snow while it lasts.
“There’s sort of like three different kinds of full-time jobs, and when I look at it all mapped out, I’m like, ‘It’s a lot,’ but I’m also excited,” Shiffrin says. She describes her season-ending win in Idaho as “the perfect way to feel motivated to dive into ski camps and everything, to do the work to get my skiing in a place where I want it to be.”
And that’s already underway.
There’s a sweet annual tradition among winter sports athletes this time of year that Shiffrin has often participated in. After months of life in a parka, they begin posting pictures of themselves in bathing suits with sand between their toes. Shiffrin’s have included surfboards and windsurfers in the waves off Hawaii.
There may be a little of that in a few weeks, when she and her family head to Mexico for a few days of relaxation. But that’s not where her mind is right now. She’s wearing a black leather jacket over her workout clothes. She’s very much moving on from maybe the strangest and most trying season of her career.
Mikaela Shiffrin won the 101st World Cup race of her career Thursday at the World Cup finals, giving her a boost heading into the Olympic year. (Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)
In Killington, Vt., in November, Shiffrin crashed in the middle of a giant slalom race that was supposed to be her coronation as the first Alpine skier with 100 World Cup race victories. The crash changed all that, delaying the celebration for three months as she recovered from a puncture wound that remains a mystery.
It’s not clear from the video what, if anything, stabbed her just above her pelvic bone.
“We had a theory that maybe my pole somehow stuck in and I rolled over it and then sort of dug around and that was what created a cavern that sort of trapped fluid, which is why I ended up needing surgery,” she said. “That’s a theory. It’s really hard to say, which is a little annoying because it’s like, did the gate do it? Did something on the gate do it?”
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter so much, but Shiffrin could barely move for three weeks. When she finally returned to racing, she suffered from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Another crash felt inevitable, making it nearly impossible to race giant slalom, the faster of the two technical disciplines in which she excels.
The mental and physical effects of the crash severely limited her time on snow this season. With the Olympics less than a year away, she’s not trying to make up for lost time. She knows that’s impossible.
But she’s already intensely focused on her training this summer, on the snow and off it, trying to do everything she can to be in prime shape when the next season begins in October. The thrill of finishing the season on a high surely helped.
“I’m looking forward to it now,” she said. “If you would have asked me two weeks ago, I’d be like, ‘I’m exhausted, and I don’t really want to start this process.’ Now I’m like, ‘No, I’ve got the energy.’ That really made a difference in the prep.”
There’s another motivation at work here, too: The Olympic Games in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, next February are the most important competition in her sport. This will be her fourth Olympics and undoubtedly her most loaded competition.
In Beijing in 2022, Shiffrin competed in all six available events: downhill, super-G, giant slalom, slalom, combined and mixed team. She left China with three DNFs and no medals.
“Right now, I feel like a joke,” she said then in a raw moment in the cold and falling snow.
She will not sign up for all the competitions this time around. She will focus instead on those that give her the best shot at a medal.
She so wants to have a different outcome in Italy and has already been doing everything she can to reach it. In a sense, that process began with getting back in the starting hut before the end of the recently completed season — packing it in was an option — and continuing to work through the mental blocks that the November crash brought on.
“It’s the Olympic season,” she said, as though it has already started instead of being more than six months away. “I want to start off the year in Sölden (Austria) not being blind to the fear element of racing, to be able to take that on. And I only know that because we got some exposure this year and started to work through that. That was a big deal.”
Indeed it was. At the moment, and for the roughly 300 days until the Olympics start, pretty much everything feels like it is.
(Top photo after Thursday’s win in the slalom at the World Cup finals: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
