CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy — Mikaela Shiffrin has plenty to be proud of already.
She is the winningest Alpine skier of all time with 108 World Cup victories to her name, nearly two dozen more than any other skier in history.
Those achievements are astounding on their own — especially considering that she has sustained that level of success even while facing the challenges of serious injury, PTSD and an all-consuming grief that followed the sudden death of her father in 2020.
Yet the Olympics remain the last stage on which Shiffrin has not dominated to the extent that many believe she is capable. After winning a gold medal apiece in 2014 and 2018, Shiffrin was shut out from the podium in 2022 in one of the biggest surprises of the Beijing Games — a disappointment she said recently that she is "to this day still trying to understand."
Now, in Cortina, Shiffrin returns to the Olympic stage for the fourth time in her career with a renewed, narrow focus. The 30-year-old said Saturday she will compete in only three events this year: slalom, giant slalom and the team combined event. She is a contender to medal in all of them, especially the individual slalom.
"I've been to four different Games and they've been four wildly different experiences," she told reporters. "Being able to show up to Cortina wide-eyed and still just as excited and motivated as the first is really great."
Shiffrin's Olympic journey began at 18 years old
At her first Olympic Games in 2014, when she was only 18 years old, she became an instant celebrity when she became the youngest skier ever to win the Olympic gold medal in slalom. By 2018, she had become the world's top-ranked female skier and claimed another Olympic gold, this time in the giant slalom.
It was clear by then that Shiffrin could have a shot at breaking skiing's most untouchable record — the most Alpine ski World Cup wins over the course of an individual career, a mark of 86 set back in 1989 by Swedish skier Ingemar Stenmark. She was only 22 years old, yet already halfway there.
Soon. Shiffrin was seriously contending in all four individual Alpine events, a rarity in skiing, where most skiers favor either the shorter, more technical slalom events or the longer, faster downhill and super-G. In 2019, she had one of the greatest ski seasons of all time.
Working through grief
In the 2020 season, which was cut short by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shiffrin won a World Cup race in each individual discipline.
Then, in early February of that year, Shiffrin's father, Jeff, died unexpectedly after falling off the roof of their family home. It devastated Shiffrin, who flew home from the World Cup circuit and didn't race again for 10 months.
"It was a week she couldn't even get out of bed. She couldn't eat. She couldn't drink anything and lost a lot of weight," said Shiffrin's mother, Eileen, in a new short documentary released this month. "I didn't think Mikaela would ever ski again. I don't think she thought she would either."
Her grief manifested in unexpected ways. She would handle the anniversary of his death, for instance, then break down after a great day of training, puzzling the people around her, she has said.
Shiffrin returned to racing in the 2021 season, and by the following year, she had reclaimed her spot atop the World Cup standings. At the Winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022, she ambitiously entered all six Alpine events — four individual races and two team events.
Yet she came away empty-handed, a stunning result she later said she was "embarrassed" by.
In an episode of her podcast recorded late last month, Shiffrin called her experience at and after Beijing a "catalyst for indescribable growth." She began working with a psychologist later that year, she said, who helped her process her grief over her father's passing.
"To this day, [I'm] still trying to understand certain pieces of Beijing entirely outside of results and performance, and I've learned so much about myself in that process," she said.
A freak injury in Killington
Then came the puncture wound. Late in 2024, during a giant slalom race in Killington, Vt., Shiffrin crashed into a slalom gate and suffered a freak injury to her abdomen that left her in blinding pain and bleeding into her ski suit. Recovery from the wound, which entailed a complete piercing of her abdominal wall, took months.
Even after Shiffrin was physically fit to return to racing, she discovered another thing holding her back: PTSD from the Killington crash. For months, she found herself unable to ski giant slalom races without subconscious hesitation. Even this year, as she raced giant slalom successfully, a podium finish eluded her until just two weeks ago.
"When I compare this season to last season, where I was returning from the injury and I couldn't imagine skiing faster G.S. — I couldn't imagine ever getting to a place where I could be contending for top tens, top fives, let alone podiums — it's pretty spectacular to have my World Cup podium again," she said Saturday.
Now she has arrived in Cortina. First up is the team combined event in which Shiffrin will ski slalom alongside a teammate who will ski the downhill. (Her teammate will be named on Monday.) Then the individual races will follow: giant slalom on Feb. 15, followed by her specialty, the slalom, on Feb. 18.
"There's definitely a fear of disappointment," she said in her podcast. "I also find that being here in this moment right now is a lot less nerve-wracking as a whole than how I expected it to be entering the season."
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