Mikaela Shiffrin has achieved major career milestones since the 2022 Beijing Olympics, including her 100th World Cup win.
Shiffrin is grappling with the public’s intense focus on the Olympics compared to her consistent success in other competitions.
Despite her past Olympic success, she feels her overall body of work is a better reflection of her dedication than a single medal.
Shiffrin aims to approach the upcoming Milano Cortina Olympics with a focus on her performance and enjoyment, not just the outcome.
EDWARDS, Colorado — A month after the 2022 Beijing Olympics, Mikaela Shiffrin won her fourth overall title. A year after that, she broke Ingemar Stenmark’s long-standing record for most World Cup victories. Two years after that, she got her 100th World Cup win, establishing a mark that is certain to stand for decades, if not all time.
All this is to say that although the Olympics mean everything to the general public, they are only a piece of Shiffrin’s considerable legacy.
And she’s not quite sure how to square that.
“There’s this external factor that really heightens the importance of the Olympics. Each one that I’ve gone to, I feel like subconsciously I realized that. But was almost naïve to it. Or maybe blind to it a little bit,” Shiffrin, 30, told USA TODAY Sports.
“Now I think I consciously realize just how much people care for those two weeks every four years. And I don’t totally know what to do with that.”
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This is not because of what happened at the Beijing Olympics, where Shiffrin had a Groundhog Day-esque nightmare. Expected to medal in multiple events, she instead left empty-handed after uncharacteristic did-not-finishes in the slalom, giant slalom and the Alpine combined.
To put that in context, she’d had only two DNFs in the previous three seasons. She had three in 11 days in Beijing.
Shiffrin’s personal disappointment was compounded by the torrent of online abuse she received, with trolls flooding her social media accounts to berate and mock her. Some suggested the then-26-year-old should retire. Others said she shouldn’t return to the United States.
As cruel as that was, Shiffrin’s feelings about the Olympics had gotten complicated even before that.
She’s not alone.
Winter Olympians, in particular, race at World Cups week in and week out each season and have world championships each year. Many see those as a better gauge, even if they occur when most of the world isn’t watching.
‘Everyone here is so focused on the Olympics, but we also all have so many big careers outside of the Olympics,’ said Paula Moltzan, who has been on the podium four times this World Cup season. ‘And so for me, I would like to perform on the Olympic day. But if it doesn’t happen, there’s so many other races in which I can perform and show my best skiing.’
It’s not that the Olympics don’t mean a great deal to Shiffrin. They do. She, like pretty much every other athlete who will compete in Milano Cortina, grew up dreaming of the Olympics. And she’s had more success at the Winter Games than most.
Her first Olympic gold medal — in the slalom at the 2014 Sochi Olympics — announced her to the world as the next great American skier. Her second, in the giant slalom four years later, remains one of the highlights of her career.
She also has a silver from the individual combined in 2018, putting her one behind Julia Mancuso’s record for a U.S. woman.
But Shiffrin is driven by process, the tinkering and the tweaking and the training in the endless pursuit of perfection. The medals and titles are only a reflection of that. Consistency and longevity are her holy grails.
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To race for Olympic gold — or silver or bronze — or to have a body of work reduced to one race or one event is too simplistic.
“In a way, an Olympic medal is literally just about the Olympic medal,” Shiffrin said. “You want it to be a symbol that represents everything. It represents hard work for sure. It’s a symbol of years of dedication and sacrifice and all of these things.
“But at the end of the day, people talk about other records that I have, or globes that I have, synonymously with a lifetime of dedication and hard work and passion and just being relentless. Who I am as a human produced the ability to achieve these things,” she said. “And with the (Olympic) medals, it’s ‘Olympic gold medalist’ and that’s it. Just Olympic gold medalist.
“It’s funny because it’s harder to attach the meaning, that really wholesome meaning to an Olympic medal.”
She is determined to try, however. But not because she feels she has something to prove or that she owes those anonymous keyboard warriors anything. The people who matter most in her life — her fiancé, Norwegian skier Aleksander Aamodt Kilde; her mother; her brother and sister-in-law; her good friends — are there because of who she is, not what she does or how many medals she wins.
Something golfer Scottie Scheffler said last summer resonated with her, too.
Scheffler is the best golfer of his generation, a four-time major winner and Olympic champion before his 30th birthday. Yet he said at the 2024 British Open that he’s come to realize how fleeting the satisfaction is from a win. Even the very biggest ones.
“It’s such an amazing moment. Then it’s like, ‘OK, what are we going to eat for dinner?’ Life goes on,’ Scheffler said.
That’s the kind of attitude Shiffrin wants to channel in Milano Cortina, a place she loves and knows well: No matter what happens, good or bad, life will go on. Just like it did after Sochi, after Pyeongchang and even after Beijing. So Shiffrin might as well enjoy herself at her fourth Olympics, especially after injuries sidelined her for good portions of the last two seasons.
She’s earned her confidence through the work she’s put in and the way she’s been skiing this season — she’s looked effortlessly dominant in her most recent races — rather than paying mind to all those things she cannot control.
“You do what you do every day and have full trust in that. You make a decision to commit,” said Karin Harjo, Shiffrin’s head coach. “It sounds easy, but it’s actually very difficult to do, especially when you have the weight of the world and the pressure on you. But she’s getting better at that.”
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Shiffrin has won all but one slalom race on the World Cup circuit so far this season. The one she didn’t win? She took second. Her win on Jan. 25 secured her ninth season title, a record for a single discipline, despite there still being two races to come after the Olympics.
She leads the race for what would be her sixth overall title. She has extended her records of World Cup wins to 108 and podiums to 166, astounding numbers both.
And after struggling in giant slalom following the November 2024 crash that left her with a puncture wound in her obliques and PTSD, she made her first podium in the discipline in two years, finishing third in the final GS race before the Games.
Shiffrin will race the giant slalom, slalom and team combined in Milano Cortina.
“The moments of winning and triumph and getting a medal and whatever, that’s just such a small, small part of it. Even though you spend all this time working for that thing, the rest of it is what makes up the bulk of life,” Shiffrin said. “That’s what’s worth putting energy into.”
That doesn’t mean she won’t try to be the fastest down the mountain. Or that she won’t expend every ounce of energy and effort she has on making each turn as perfect as possible and carrying over what she’s done in training to her races.
If she does that, Shiffrin can be happy with her Olympic performance, medal or no medal.
“I’m just going to enjoy this. And I’m going to do the best I can,” she said. “I’m going to train hard and I’m going to focus on the skills I’ve built over a long period of time and I’m just going to stay true to me and focus and put it all on the mountain.”