MILAN — There are bad omens, and then there are the grim tidings that rose up before Mikaela Shiffrin in the most important race of her life. Olympic preparation can take you a long way, but it can’t quite prepare you for what she saw in front of her as she prepared to take her second, and final, run in the women’s slalom in Cortina.
Shiffrin had laid down the fastest time in the first run, meaning she had the chance to watch every single medal-capable skier post their second run before she skied. Two skiers before Shiffrin’s turn, Sweden’s Cornelia Oehlund was carving out a fast time — 0.22 ahead of the leaders’ pace, to start — when disaster struck from nowhere. Oehlund’s left pole snapped, leaving her holding the stub and scrambling for balance. She held on as long as she could, then spun out and failed to finish.
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An even worse fate awaited Germany’s Lena Duerr, the second-fastest skier in the first round. As Duerr pushed onto the course, her right ski clipped the wrong way around the first gate, an instant disqualification seconds into a potential medal run. That’s an elementary-level mistake, and a heartbreaking one.
Shiffrin had to watch all this unfolding right in front of her as she prepared to ski her second run. But this wasn’t any ordinary race; Shiffrin can, and does, handle those with ease. This was the Olympics, the demon that has tortured and tormented Shiffrin for so many years now. On her back hung the weight of expectation, pressure, condemnation, anxiety.
And somehow, for the first time in eight years, she used all that weight to propel her, not drag her down. Shiffrin fired down the course in Cortina at such a speed that she increased her already-massive lead over the field, from 0.82 to 1.5 seconds. She claimed her third Olympic gold medal, and reclaimed her headspace.
“It’s just so much effort and work and focus and preparation for two runs of 47, 50 seconds,” Shiffrin said. “To actually be in the right mentality in the right moment is nearly impossible.”
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According to NBC, Shiffrin’s margin of victory was the largest since 1998. She’s now the first American woman skier to win three Olympic gold medals, and has the distinction of being both the youngest and oldest American woman to win gold.
More than that, though, Shiffrin won back her legacy. One of the cruel ironies about the Olympics is that it’s better to be a one-and-done medalist than a win-a-few, lose-a-bunch multi-time Olympian. Beijing blanked Shiffrin; she didn’t even finish three of the events she entered. Milano-Cortina was a bit kinder — she at least made it down the mountain in her earlier events, though at underwhelming-for-her speeds.
With every event that passed without hardware, though, the muttering grew louder. Was Shiffrin spooked by the Olympics? Cursed? How could the most decorated World Cup skier in history dominate everywhere else on the calendar except these two weeks every four years?
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Shiffrin has been upfront about her mental health challenges, from the Olympic drought to the PTSD she suffered after a horrific crash in 2024. And while there’s far more attention paid to the mental strains and struggles of Olympic athletes now than ever before, that doesn’t make those struggles go away. Sharing your challenges with the world can keep them a bit more manageable, but there’s no gold medal for sharing.
So that’s why Wednesday’s race was so critical for Shiffrin. Imagine if she’d fallen short yet again. Imagine if her pole had broken, or if she’d caught that first gate, or suffered any of the other hundred woes that would have kept her off the podium. Imagine the questions that would have followed her, the media second-guessing, the social-media garbage, the internal anxieties that would have wracked her for another four years, and maybe for forever.
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“There will always be criticism, but I was here to earn the moment and that is going to require some risk,” she said. “Risk of not finishing. It’s also risk of being criticized, and to accept that. (It is) not the easiest thing to do, but in the end today we were able to do that.”
She stared that grim future in the face … and she flat-out skied right through it.
“I wanted to be free, I wanted to unleash,” she said afterward. “It’s not easy to do that, but I’ve been so focused every single day.
“… In the end, today, showing up — that was the thing I wanted most. More than the medal. Now, to also get to have a medal is unbelievable.”
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In an Olympics where pressure is becoming a key subtext, Shiffrin met the moment, and made it hers. She rewrote her legacy at full speed, high in the mountains of Cortina.
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