Ski racer Mikaela Shiffrin hasn’t found any answers even months after her Olympic nightmare.
She was considered the big favorite for gold in several disciplines of the alpine skiers at the Olympic Winter Games in Beijing. In the end, however, Mikaela Shiffrin returned home without a single medal.
Symbolic are the pictures of the 27-year-olds, which show them at the edge of the piste after retiring from their favorite discipline, slalom. Shiffrin cried bitter tears of disappointment, omnipresent the pain of losing his father. “I’d really like to call him right now,” she confessed.
Months after the bitter Beijing games, Mikaela Shiffrin worked through her feelings in a post for “The Player’s TribuneThe death of her father, who fell from the roof while doing craft work on the house in February 2020 and succumbed to his injuries, still weighs on her, because Jeff Shiffrin was always there for the winter sportswoman.
“I was never home for ten years. I might have made it to a family gathering or two at Christmas. Skiing wasn’t just my life, it was our life,” she writes. Her mother accompanied her to all races, her father took care of the organization of “Team Shiffrin” and always filmed with his camera.
Shiffrin: The mountain as a place to breathe
However, she cannot really say whether the internal processing is related to the performance in China. “People always ask me, ‘What happened in Beijing?’ “You want an answer. And I really don’t have one. I could give you the media answer I always give. I could put on a brave face and say something general. But the real truth is… I don’t know.”
Ultimately, it’s all about “two minutes of your life. Two minutes, any day. You’re going down the mountain. You’re trying to go fast. You’re trying not to make mistakes. Sometimes you win gold, like I did . Sometimes you fail, like me”.
However, she also has days when everything succeeds. “Perfect turns. Perfect technique. I forget the pain. I remember my father from afar and when I climb the mountain it feels like the only place I can really breathe.”
After the Olympic drama, Mikaela Shiffrin finally won the overall World Cup for the fourth time – a success that she couldn’t really classify. “When I turned around after Beijing and won the World Cup, people said to me: ‘Mikaela, now that you’re much better…’ I never said it out loud, but I always thought: Is that me? We equate winning with ‘okay’ and failing with ‘not okay’. In truth, I’m neither okay nor wrong.”