Mikaela Shiffrin, two-time Olympic champion and seven-time world champion, is the most successful ski racer of all time, just one World Cup victory missing from the all-time record. But it almost never came to that: Almost three years ago, the 27-year-old wanted to hang up her skis.
Mikaela Shiffrin has had to cope with several private strokes of fate in recent years. First her grandmother died in 2019, then her father Jeff, who was very close to her on and off the slopes, had a fatal accident in 2020.
“There was a time when I never wanted to ski again,” admitted the American in an interview with “Sport Bild”.
After the death of her father, she also noticed that she was no longer mentally involved. Shiffrin could not memorize the competition route, which was one of her great strengths for years.
“It was only this season after the first slalom run in Levi that I realized that I could remember the course again. I last had that feeling before my father died,” explained Shiffrin: “Since then I’ve only had parts of the route in my head, it made it difficult to ski the way I wanted to.” Then she added, “I couldn’t trust my head anymore.”
Shiffrin on Kilde: “He makes me so much happier”
The turning point for the 85-time World Cup winner, who won gold in giant slalom and silver in super-G and slalom at the last world championships in Courchevel and Méribel, was when she worked with a psychologist. “First it was a sports psychologist, but that wasn’t enough to process my grief. She explained to me: When you have such a sudden, unexpected accident, a chemical reaction happens in your brain.”
Shiffrin was diagnosed with a “post-traumatic stress disorder” of the kind known from war veterans – an analysis, according to the exceptional athlete, that helped “understand everything”.
An additional anchor in life for Mikaela Shiffrin is her life partner Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, who himself is one of the current top skiers. “He makes me so much happier. That was especially important after the last few years.”
The fact that Kilde is also such a passionate and successful skier is a big plus: “We ski together, study videos. We talk about the sport, but we also giggle a lot and send us funny Instagram posts.”