Mikaela Shiffrin won her first Olympic gold medal in eight years on Sunday, but for the 30-year-old American it felt above all like the first since her father’s death six years ago — the culmination of a long journey to reach a place where the moment was just about ski racing once again.
“Everything in life that you do after you lose someone you love is like a new experience,” she said after claiming the slalom title to put her Beijing 2022 Games blank behind her.
“It’s like being born again. I still have so many moments where I resist this. I don’t want to be in life without my dad.”
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That private struggle unfolded alongside a complicated sporting return marked by injury, self-doubts and the slow rebuilding of trust in her own skiing.
Mikaela Shiffrin dpa/picture alliance via Getty I
“When I did get injured… my slalom was in a place that I felt was repeatable. And my GS (giant slalom) was not quite,” she said.
Even the Olympic stage felt much more complicated than before.
“Yes, I think it’s harder,” she said when asked whether excelling at the Games was more difficult than on the World Cup circuit.
“I wouldn’t have said that in Sochi (2014, when she won slalom gold) because I was like, what are we talking about? It’s just skiing.”
On Sunday, however, she found the clarity she had been searching for.
“What was beautiful was that I actually felt that it was… it just felt like ski racing. It felt like another day on the mountain between the start and the finish,” she said.
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Shiffrin’s comments revealed how thin the margin remains between success and failure, regardless of experience. After a disappointing team combined race, she was reminded how much work she had to do despite her career all-time record 108 World Cup wins.
“I can show up with however many victories… and they think it’s a given. And I’m like, this just goes to show how hard it is,” she said.
She beat Camille Rast of Switzerland by 1.50 seconds – a gap almost as big as the total of the margins separating first and second in women’s Olympic slaloms since 1998.
“It felt like it was just on the limit… we’re just right nudging against the ceiling,” she said.
Before the race, however, her grief had resurfaced.
“I sort of started to cry a little bit because I was thinking about my dad. Maybe today was the first time that I could actually accept this reality,” she said after choosing in the finish area to take a moment to be silent with him.
Her mourning process has been uncertain rather than spiritual.
“Part of my journey through grief has been challenging because I don’t feel this thing that a lot of people talk about… this deep spiritual connection,” she said. “People talk about feeling the presence, and I haven’t felt it in that way. I feel connected to him in my thoughts and in talking about him.”
What enabled Shiffrin to reach that moment was collective belief.
“The wonderful thing about this day was that I felt proud before it happened because of my team,” she said, describing conversations that helped untangle her emotions.
In the end, the message they gave her was disarmingly uncomplicated.
“It is as simple as skiing. It is something that I have within myself and we’ve trained and prepared for,” Shiffrin said.
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