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Monday, February 7, 2022

Mikaela Shiffrin's fall reopens discussion of Olympic pressure - The Washington Post

YANQING, China — Mikaela Shiffrin’s Olympics were just five turns old when they became impossibly uncertain. Shiffrin’s position — sliding on her left hip, wiped out on the snow, missing a gate she had to make — brought first a gasp, then the obvious question: “What happened?” But that’s not nearly as important as the ensuing question: “What next?”

“I think there’s a lot of questions that will be asked,” Shiffrin said.

Most important will be those she asks of herself. Monday’s giant slalom, an event in which she won gold four years ago at the PyeongChang Olympics, “was finished basically before it even started,” Shiffrin said, and there is nothing short of shock in that development. But even if she simply made one poor turn on the course at the National Alpine Ski Centre — her in-the-moment-assessment of the calamity — she knows the consequences put in doubt her entire Olympics.

She was favored to win medals in at least three events and expected to contend in one or maybe two more. One of those ended without even a trip across the finish line or the privilege of earning a second run. Maybe it was a physical error. That it happened when it did — in the first run of her first event at her third Olympics — makes considering her mental state a necessity. That’s true about what happened Monday. But it’s also true about what’s to come, beginning with Wednesday’s slalom.

“I felt that I had the right mentality,” Shiffrin said.

For an elite athlete, the 26-year-old has always been almost alarmingly candid. In saying Monday, “I won’t ever get over this,” that streak is alive and well. But in the course of all that endearing frankness are kernels of uncertainty that can seem surprising for someone so accomplished. She is among the best ever to do what she does. But that status does little to eradicate doubt.

Before Monday, Shiffrin had raced in five events over three Olympics, and her finishes were, in order: fifth, first, first, fourth and second. Since her last DNF in a giant slalom, Shiffrin had completed 30 such races on the World Cup circuit, in the Olympics and at world championships. She won nine. She finished in the top three 19 times. She was outside the top seven just once.

Her results sometimes suggest she is a machine. She is not, and not close. When she was mulling over the Olympics in an interview more than four months before her arrival in Beijing, her candor about the experience was disarming. For an athlete in a sport such as Alpine skiing, the Olympics carry outsize importance, because they come with a singular opportunity for mainstream exposure. But in chatting with her before the season, Shiffrin made clear to me that they came with something else: dread.

“I’m kind of accepting and trying to prepare for basically the discomfort of the one situation that you hope would be this joyous, amazing event,” Shiffrin said in September. “What people see is the pictures with the Olympic rings and, ‘We went to the Opening Ceremonies!’ and: ‘Look at these cool outfits! This is such a fun time. This is so great!’ But honestly, it’s terrifying for the entire two weeks straight.”

Fit that assessment with Monday’s events, and it’s ominous. Given what we have learned about athletes and mental health over the past few years, it also gives pause. Just six months ago, American gymnast Simone Biles entered the Tokyo Olympics as an even surer bet than Shiffrin was in Monday’s giant slalom. Shiffrin has been pushed this entire season by, among others, Slovakia’s Petra Vlhova and Sweden’s Sara Hector, who won the giant slalom gold Monday. Biles arrived in Tokyo with no peer, with a standard only she could attain. And then — in midair, performing tricks she had mindlessly pulled off for years — she became so disoriented that she couldn’t compete without endangering herself.

Shiffrin watched every bit of those Games not just as a fan but as one of, what, maybe two or three people in the whole world who could relate? As she thought about her Olympics to come, she was nothing short of an exposed nerve.

“I don’t want to listen to the pressure,” she said back then. “I don’t want to listen to the expectations. I don’t want to hear what other people are saying. I just want to block it out completely.

“And to an extent, that can work. But at the Olympics, it really rarely does. You cannot limit distractions 100 percent. You kind of can’t limit distractions at all.”

Now, the distraction is her own unexpected slip and slide, by her own assessment a “huge disappointment.” The early indication is that she is not so shaken that she is skiing’s version of Biles, because after laying herself bare to reporters at the base of the hill — “I’m not going to cry about this because that’s just wasting energy,” she said — she posed for a picture with teammate Nina O’Brien, offered some advice for O’Brien’s second run, then flipped a bag over her shoulder. She headed off to train for slalom even as the enzymes in her gut were still digesting the disappointment.

“I think the easiest thing to say is that I skied a couple good turns and I skied one turn a bit wrong and I really paid the hardest consequence for that,” Shiffrin said. “And now we have to move forward because there’s a lot still to come the next two weeks.”

First in moving forward is the slalom Wednesday. It’s not overstating the situation to say Shiffrin is the best slalom skier ever. She won slalom gold in Sochi in her Olympic debut. She has four golds in slalom at world championships. Last month, she won her 47th World Cup slalom race, giving her more victories in any single discipline than any skier, male or female, ever.

Yet combine what has happened this season with what happened Monday, and it’s hard to call Shiffrin the favorite for gold. Vlhova has skied in seven World Cup slaloms this season and won five. In the other two, she was second — to Shiffrin. Shiffrin is well-suited, too, to the Alpine combined — one run of downhill, one of slalom — an event in which she won silver in PyeongChang, one that will be contested Feb. 17.

There’s a lot left at these Olympics, and what happens from here will be fascinating. It is a window into the mind and soul of Mikaela Shiffrin but also into the stew of emotions and burdens the Olympics bring. Afterward Monday, she said simply, “My best chance for the next races is to move forward, to refocus, and I feel like I’m in a good place to do that.” She’s absolutely right. But with as many as four more races to go here, her relationship with the Olympics is clearly fraught. There’s no telling what’s to come.

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Mikaela Shiffrin's fall reopens discussion of Olympic pressure - The Washington Post
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