In Mikaela Shiffrin’s worst Olympic moment, tragedy gives her perspective
YANQING, China — Mikaela Shiffrin was slaloming through emotions after the Olympic race that betrayed her, processing the most disappointing runs of her skiing life, when her weary mind tried to venture back to “real loss.”
A reporter had alluded to it. Shiffrin knew what he meant. Two years ago this month, her beloved father, Jeff, had died in an accident at the family home. Here, amid sporting grief, she began to talk about the perspective it gave her — “but, right now,” she said, and then she stopped.
She bowed her head.
She looked away, as if in search of privacy.
Feelings welled. Memories resurfaced.
“Right now,” she said after pausing for 20 seconds to collect herself, “I would really like to call him.”
She couldn’t, and so before she could talk about perspective or Wednesday’s relative insignificance, before she could realize that the sun would rise on Thursday and life would go on, she cried.
He would’ve told her “to just get over it,” Mikaela said with a sobbing laugh.
“But he's not here to say that,” she continued, and the laughter left her voice.
That he couldn’t console her, or counsel her, didn’t make this easier. In the moment, it made her angry.
It would, though, eventually put this “huge letdown” at the Olympics in life’s broader context, she acknowledged. “It does give me perspective,” she initially said, and by the end of 40 introspective minutes talking to media, she had come around to this.
“As hard as it is right now, it's not comparable to, um,” she said, and she struggled to find the words, but found them, “... to some of the worst things that I've experienced.”
'Heartbroken beyond comprehension'
There were days, plenty of days, at the beginning of life without Jeff when Mikaela could hardly rise out of bed.
Jeff had spent the last months of his life documenting the best season of Mikaela’s. He was “kindhearted, loving, caring, patient,” and to the Shiffrin family, “our mountains, our ocean, our sunrise, our heart, our soul, our everything.”
Then he was gone, and Mikaela was devastated. “Heartbroken beyond comprehension.” She couldn’t stop crying. Couldn’t escape a cloud of grief. She didn’t ski for months, and considered walking away from the sport.
Over time, she recovered. But as the two-year anniversary of Dad’s death approached, on Feb. 2, two days before the Olympics, he was on her mind. There were “some challenging moments,” she admitted last week. “It's hard not to remember the place we were in,” she said.
That place, or somewhere adjacent, is where her mind seemed to go on Wednesday, and no, it didn’t ease her pain. But previous visits to it did seem to change her outlook. After speaking about her anger, she was asked about her misery. About being stuck in the Olympic “closed loop,” with all these negative thoughts, and with COVID testing swabs going down her throat every morning.
She appreciated the sympathy, but then she peered off into the distance, her eyes drifting across Xiaohaituo Mountain, and she said: “It’s a pretty beautiful day.”
Finding perspective
She spoke about her “incredible teammates,” and the silver medal that one of them, Ryan Cochran-Siegle, won Tuesday.
She spoke about her boyfriend, Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, a fellow skier who’d “been working so hard to get an Olympic medal his whole career,” and “had some really bad luck,” but finally got one Tuesday.
“And I have three medals,” she added with a measured giggle. “I mean, those are still back home in my closet.”
“And you know what?” she continued. “The throat swab tests, they make you choke a little bit, but they're not that bad.”
She spoke about Nina O’Brien, a fellow U.S. skier who’d suffered an open fracture of her tibia and fibula on Monday, but who “was somehow still keeping her spirits up.”
She spoke about “the people here” at these Olympics, who “have been so friendly and so welcoming and so kind.”
There was a time, earlier in her 26-year-old life, when she would have felt “weighed down” by big moments, by pressure, by expectations, and when failing to meet them would have quashed all these optimistic thoughts.
But she isn’t “scared to feel a little bit weighed down” now. “Maybe because it doesn’t feel” — she paused, and seemed to realize that this was the perspective she now had.
“At the end of the day,” she said, “you can let it go. And say, ‘That's not the worst thing that I ever experienced in life.'”
