Winter Olympics 2026: Mikaela Shiffrin looks to recapture her Olympic vibe

MILAN — This time last year, the most decorated alpine skier in history was trying to force herself to ski again. Mikaela Shiffrin was attempting to return to the slalom and giant slalom races, and found herself unable to do what she’d been doing all her life.

“I could barely even finish a run,” she recalled recently, “not because of crashing, but because when I told my body to go, it just wouldn’t.”

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Just a few months before, in November 2024, she was on her second run in Killington, Vermont, and on the cusp of capturing her 100th World Cup victory. No other alpine skier, male or female, has more than 86, and here was Shiffrin, about to break into triple digits.

But she clipped a gate midway through her run, setting off a crash that sent her pinwheeling into the slope’s netting. She doubled over in agony, unable to ward off the pain radiating through her abdomen.

“It’s honestly kind of difficult to explain what the pain felt like,” she later wrote in The Players Tribune. “But the closest I can get would probably be, it was like … not only was there a knife stabbing me, but the knife was actually still inside of me.”

She was extricated from the slope by sled, and later examinations revealed she had suffered significant abdominal injury, nearly puncturing her colon. But while her body healed, her mind continued to struggle. The diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder from the crash reverberated for months afterward as she attempted to manage the panic and fear that accompanied her return to the slopes.

“Everybody needs to understand with these struggles that they don’t work linearly,” Shiffrin recently said. “They don’t work in the way you think they’re going to, or expect they’re going to. … Time helps. Exposure helps. It doesn’t work to just back away from your fears, but it works to take them on in bite-sized pieces.”

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Killington isn’t the only slope that holds ghosts for Shiffrin. There’s also the Yanqing National Alpine Skiing Centre, host of the alpine events for Beijing’s 2022 Olympics. Shiffrin went into the 2022 Games a two-time gold medalist, victorious both at Sochi (slalom) and Pyeongchang (giant slalom). But at Beijing, she failed to even finish in three of her six events, her best individual finish a ninth in Super G.

“I don’t want Beijing to be the reason that I’m scared of the Olympics. And for the past few years, it has been a little bit,” Shiffrin told Olympics.com last fall. “When Cortina comes along, we’ll just take it day by day, take it as it comes.”

She arrived at the Milan Cortina Games with as much momentum as she’s had in years. She finally managed that 100th World Cup victory in February, and since then she’s added seven more, including a victory in slalom in the Czech Republic just days before the Olympics’ Opening Ceremony. That combined success, that validation of her belief in herself, has given her a new, more optimistic mindset heading into the Games.

“Especially after the past two seasons, with battling a couple different pretty serious injuries, I’ve had two fairly incomplete seasons,” Shiffrin said recently. “So, to be at this point right now … heading into the Olympics, but also from the perspective of just having a really successful World Cup season, I’m really excited about that.”

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But then came the team combined ski on Feb. 10 where Shiffrin not only lost the lead Breezy Johnson staked her in the downhill but finished 15th overall in her slalom run — nearly a second behind first place. A mediocre ski from Shiffrin would have notched her and Johnson gold. Instead they dropped all the way off the podium to fourth place.

How will she rebound from the rocky start?

She has a few days, as the giant slalom is Sunday. And she also has the lessons of four years ago to fall back on.

“The one thing you can expect from the Olympics is that things are just not really going to go according to your plan,” Shiffrin said. “So you’ve got to roll with the punches and have a really good open mind.”