Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published on December 9th. Mikaela Shiffrin celebrated her 80th World Cup victory in her career on December 29 with a slalom victory in Semmering, Austria. For the latest updates on Shiffrin and the alpine ski season, visit OlympicTalk.
Sometime in the coming weeks, American alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin — arguably a very loaded and problematic word — will win her 83rd race on the World Cup course, the highest level of her sport, overtaking her American compatriot Lindsey Vonn for the most career wins by a woman . Not long after that, she is expected to win her 87th race, one more than Ingemar Stenmark of Sweden, who won his 86 races from 1975-1989. With this victory, Shiffrin, who will be 28 in March, is rightly celebrated for this achievement.
This celebration will undercut the moment and give Shiffrin less praise than she deserves, because that’s what Career Records does just for existing. Career records condense the pain and struggle of an athletic career into a single, antiseptic number: most this or most that. Touchdown passes, base hits, goals, sub-four-minute miles. It will be said that Shiffrin’s record is the result of continued brilliance, and that’s obviously true. It will be said that she packed her victories into a shorter span – 12 seasons – than either of the last two racers she passed; Vonn has raced 18 seasons and won 82nd at the age of 33, while Stenmark has raced 16 seasons and won his last race at the age of 32. So that will also be true.
But these descriptions will soften the toll of Shiffrin’s work, because that’s what career records do, too. They simplify the complicated and sand down the rough edges, serving the myth that the number chosen was inevitable. This was especially true of Shiffrin: She was a child prodigy, whispering — and then shouting — about the sport’s breadth when she was barely a teenager as the next big — and possibly biggest — thing. At 17 she won her first World Cup race and at 18 an Olympic gold medal (Slalom 2014 in Sochi). She won a remarkable 17 World Cup races in the season that ended March 17, 2019, just four days after her 24th birthday. By then she had won 60 World Cup races and looked set to pass Vonn and Stenmark in just two more seasons. Hosanas were prepared.
It didn’t exactly play out that way. In the more than three seasons since that remarkable 2019 season, Shiffrin has won a total of 16 races (40 of Shiffrin’s 76 wins were put into three hugely successful seasons from 2017 to 2019). It has changed since then, and it has been changed — by personal tragedy, by injury, by recognition of the personal and professional mortality that young athletes successfully deny and older athletes either unsuccessfully deny or accept and fight against. What seemed easy has become much more difficult. (Of course it was always difficult, Shiffrin just made it look like the extraordinary among us do.) And most of all, she persevered.
“For the past two years I’ve had a note with something I wrote down,” Shiffrin said last weekend from her World Cup base in Europe. “It’s basically saying what I want most in life is to go back two and a half years. I want to go back to where I was at the beginning of the year right after this season with 17 wins. It was my best season ever and I was so happy. And I would give anything to get that feeling back.” She doesn’t say that sadly, but enlightened, something else entirely.
The arc of Shiffrin’s life and career after this 2019 season is well known to ski racing fans and even a wider audience who witnessed her struggles at the 2022 Olympics. (More on that coming soon.) Just before the start of the 2020 World Cup season, Shiffrin’s 98-year-old grandmother, Pauline Condron, died. It’s knee-jerk to lessen the death of the very old, but loss is loss and Shiffrin was very close to her grandmother. Shiffrin won six races from November through late January – not at the pace of her previous season, but not shabby. On February 2, 2020, her father Jeff died from an injury sustained in an accident at the family home in Colorado while Mikaela was racing in Europe. From that moment on, Shiffrin has carried extra weight.
As we spoke last week, I hinted to Shiffrin — and again, this isn’t revealing when it comes to following the life of an athlete or a human being — that what had been a certain kind of innocence had been in recent years has become significantly more complicated.
“When I was 16, 17, 18 years old,” says Shiffrin. “I didn’t know many people who had died. Since then, two of the five most important people in my life have passed away. You are no longer here. And that number doesn’t get any smaller as I get older.”
After her father’s death, Shiffrin did not race for over 300 days, much of that time during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic during which World Cup racing continued with relatively few cancellations (albeit with many stoppages and absences and of course, no spectators). She returned and won three races in the 2021 season, bringing her total to 69. Content that highlighted her status in that moment often noted that she was “back.” She wasn’t back. She’ll never be “back” in that easy, sports-centric way.
“To return to racing after my father died,” says Shiffrin. “So many people were like, ‘Well, you’re back.’ And then I won again and people were like, ‘Wow, you’re really back.’ Actually, I still had big problems.”
At the end of the 2021 season, Shiffrin won four medals at the World Championships, including gold in the downhill slalom combined event. She won four more World Cup races before the 22 Olympics but did not fare well in Beijing. She finished early in both Giant Slalom (stunning) and Slalom (stunning) and then, after finishing – but not competing – in the Super-G and Downhill speed events, competed in the Slalom portion of the Combination . It was an inexplicably poor performance that was endlessly analyzed in real time, including by Shiffrin herself, because she doesn’t shy away from public self-analysis, painful as it may be.
Since then, on the one hand, she admits that the experience left scars, because of course she did. At the same time, “I think people ask me about it,” she says. “Less and less every day, but I’m trying to spread the message that I’m going to carry on.” Some of this will always remain a mystery. “In slalom, giant slalom and combined, I went out on the fourth gate, on the fifth destiny, on the ninth gate, but I skied those gates exactly how I wanted to ski them. I don’t normally belong to DNF. And in those races, I wasn’t imagining going off track, that’s for sure. But I did.”
Ten months have passed since that experience; three years since the death of her grandmother and father. That year she won World Cup slaloms in Levi, Finland on consecutive days, Nos. 75 and 76. And then over Thanksgiving weekend in Killington in central Vermont, a hilltop home game where she had won five slaloms in five starts finished fifth (and 13th in giant slalom).
Through it all, the personal tragedies and the racing struggles, her relationship with her sport has evolved. The giant slalom finish in Killington does not assign enough to the training this year in the discipline. The rest is more ethereal, more mental. “I’m in the midst of this whole seasonal epiphany, and maybe the Olympics sparked it, how hard it is not only to win a ski race, but to make it to the finish. It’s something I haven’t struggled with for most of my career, but when you think about it, in ski racing, and when you add up the changing conditions, how much is important to us, it’s amazing to me what I’ve done for that last 12 years.”
If that sounds like a lack of confidence, maybe, but that’s too easy. Think of it as both a mature appreciation and a return to her racing roots. Jeff Shiffrin taught his children – Mikaela and her brother Taylor – to artfully embrace the process of skiing and let the gains flow from it. “Every time I started a race to win, instead of doing my best, I didn’t win that race. But there’s such an adrenaline rush in our sport before you even win the race and that’s what I’m still here for. If I was only here to win, I would have retired by now. Since I’m between 82 and 86, people find it hard to believe, but it’s true. I would be done now.”
She’s not done yet. Thinking about what might come next, Shiffrin comes to what most athletes conclude: “Everything else I do in life is probably going to be tough, but most other things aren’t going to give me as much in return as Ski racing.” The 2026 Olympic Games will be jointly hosted by the city of Milan and the mountain resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo in Italy, a legendary venue for ski racing. “Anything could happen, and I could choose to retire,” says Shiffrin. “But I don’t see it before the [next] Olympics.”
Unfinished business? (And to be fair, despite Beijing, Shiffrin has three Olympic medals; the only US woman to have won more is Julia Mancuso, at four.) “Not in terms of the medals,” she says. “But the last three Olympics have been in places that aren’t normally associated with alpine skiing.” [Boy is right: Sochi, PyeongChang and Beijing.] “Cortina is a place I love. I would like to experience an Olympics there.” Pause. “And when I’m racing, obviously I want to be a medal contender, and that’s all part of it.” One sip.
Ahead are 82 and 86. Shiffrin will compete in a giant slalom and a slalom this weekend in Sestriere, Italy, site of the 2006 Olympic and Paralympic Alpine races. The World Cup goes on from there, with 13 more slaloms and giant slaloms beyond that, and numerous speed races should Shiffrin choose to race those, as she has often done in the past. There are many ways to finish this job, so to speak.
But above all, she understands that nothing is promised, not even life, and certainly not a ski race victory. “In a way, I know I’m going to win another World Cup race,” she says. Allegedly. “But I also know you can’t be sure.” And that’s the lesson that makes the notes most telling.
For more information on Shiffrin’s 2022/23 season, visit OlympicTalk.
Tim Layden is a writer-at-large for NBC Sports. He was previously senior writer at Sports Illustrated for 25 years.
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