For Mikaela Shiffrin, the goalposts keep moving.
All this talk about her setting the record for most World Cup wins and becoming the best skier ever is so 2023. Now that Shiffrin is set to race again as the alpine season begins this weekend in Sölden, Austria, the conversation has shifted to when she’ll get her 100th win, a rather silly number that few would have thought of not long ago, before Shiffrin started collecting wins and crystal balls for seasonal championships like they were Christmas decorations.
She has 97 victories at the start of the season, as well as three Olympic medals, two of which are gold, five overall titles, 11 discipline titles and 14 World Championship medals. That’s all seriously stupid.
Hearing 29-year-old Shiffrin talk about her career so far and what lies ahead is to understand how her job means meeting different standards than everyone else.
She will compete in slalom, giant slalom and super-G this season, but has put downhill on the back burner for now. So of course she is asked why she doesn’t also participate in the descent.
She’s been at this since she was in her mid-teens, and yet the idea that she might be in the back end of her career remains difficult to contemplate. She knows better than anyone how physically difficult it is to compete week after week, so that she can be in the hunt for the season title and also peak in February for the Alpine World Championships in Austria, or next season for the Olympic Games. in Italy. Of course, she’s expected to do both, and win…obviously.
“It’s never obvious, it’s never easy,” Shiffrin said during a preseason conference call this week.
After being sidelined for six weeks through injury, Mikaela Shiffrin returned in March to win the slalom title at the 2024 World Cup season finale. (Christophe Pallot/Agence Zoom/Getty Images)
Shiffrin had a revealing moment this summer during the Olympic Games in Paris. Her seats in the Olympic Stadium for the 400 meter hurdles happened to be right next to those of the family of Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, who is basically the Mikaela Shiffrin of her sport, or vice versa, if you’re more of a track person. then a skier.
Everyone in the Shiffrin camp was confident that McLaughlin-Levrone would win – by a wide margin. She was as close to a guarantee as she was in Paris.
And yet McLaughlin-Levrone’s family was in trouble.
They knew how hard this was, how anything could happen until she got over the last hurdle and floated to the finish line. Shiffrin knows that too. She and her team have had to deal with that every week for almost a decade, along with all the stressors that come with being one of the most famous athletes in the world.
Now, as strange as it may seem, Shiffrin will begin to find some peace where others might not necessarily think she would. After months of being pulled in all directions, balancing summer ski camps in South America and training blocks with sponsorship commitments, promotional opportunities and philanthropy, the racing begins. Once again, she can laser-focus on dancing through the gates on a snow-capped mountain.
“It’s hard, it’s stressful, but it’s also peaceful, and that’s what I love about it,” she said.
She knows she is at the back end of her career, but has no definitive plans for how long she will compete after the 2026 Olympics.
After an injury-riddled season last year — she somehow still won the World Cup slalom title — Shiffrin is hoping for a smoother ride this year.
Shiffrin sprained the MCL and tibiofibular ligament in her knee in January. The injuries sidelined her for six weeks. When she returned, she won two more races, dispelling the doubts that still plague her when she is injured or away from skiing for a while and it feels like the ski world will move on without her.
“You feel pain or weakness and you think, ‘I don’t think I can do that,'” she said. “Logically, I know I did that, but I don’t think I can do it again.”
Even during a healthy season, she can have those doubts if she hasn’t skied a discipline for a few weeks and then has to come back to it.
“It’s never obvious, it’s never easy,” Mikaela Shiffrin says of her expectations. The new alpine season starts this weekend in Austria. (Jonas Ericsson/Agence Zoom/Getty Images)
Will she be able to move her feet fast enough to get around the tight slalom gates, she wonders?
It probably all sounds a bit strange to its competitors. Even if she doesn’t do downhill for a while — no word yet on her plans for the 2026 Olympics — Shiffrin is as good an all-around skier as she is. She has won 60 slalom races, 22 giant slalom, five super-G and four downhill.
To some extent, her offseason has been an exercise in dispelling those doubts as this opening weekend in Sölden approaches. Last summer she was plagued by bad weather, which limited her time in the snow. Then she packed up her racing schedule and started to feel like she was running on fumes. Then came the crash and the injury.
When this offseason started, she sat down with her mother, Eileen, her longest-tenured coach, and tried to figure out a plan so she could really feel prepared at the start of the season. They came up with a mix of short camps and indoor skiing and a trip to South America to ensure she got the necessary time in the snow.
Every day she pushed herself a step further. Even for the best skiers in the world, the sport is an exercise in risk tolerance. How quickly can your mind make your body take a turn? How far can you fly during a jump?
“Every day I stretch the rubber band a little bit,” Shiffrin said.
This weekend in Sölden, she plans to stretch it as far as she has in a long time, and maybe even find some peace while she does it.
(Top photo of Mikaela Shiffrin celebrating her slalom title at the 2024 World Cup season finale in Austria in March: Franz Kirchmayr / SEPA.Media / Getty Images)