It takes time and space to grieve, and maybe Mikaela Shiffrin needs more of it | Opinion

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BEIJING – After a career filled with the kind of success most athletes can only dream of, Mikaela Shiffrin is at a loss for how to handle being human.

She cannot make her body, or her skis, do what she wants. It is there in her mind, and in her training runs. But when she leaves the starting gate, it remains stubbornly just beyond her grasp.

She doesn’t think it’s the pressure, or the expectations on her at these Winter Olympics in Beijing. Shiffrin has been here before and, frankly, been through worse. But she still doesn’t know how to fix it.

And the person who would is no longer here.

“Right now, I would really like to call him, so that doesn’t make it easier,” Shiffrin said, breaking down as she spoke of her father, who died in 2020. “He would probably tell me to just get over it.

"But he’s not here to say that so, on top of everything else, I’m pretty angry at him, too.”

Time for a reset

For the second time in as many races, Shiffrin skied off the course after five gates Wednesday. After winning two gold medals and a silver in her first two Olympics, thus far at the Beijing Games she has Did Not Finishes in back-to-back technical races for the first time since December 2011.

Some will suggest, or even say openly, that Shiffrin is mentally fragile. That she cannot handle the spotlight on her that only grows brighter with every year. That she fears being a disappointment more than she craves being a champion.

If only it were that simple.

Two years and one week ago, Shiffrin’s father Jeff died unexpectedly after a fall at the family’s home. The loss was, and still is, devastating, and Shiffrin has been open about how unmoored she was by her grief.

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She didn’t just lose her father. The whole Shiffrin family lost its center.

Critical a role as her mother Eileen plays as one of Shiffrin’s coaches, it was Jeff Shiffrin who kept the family running. He was the one who bought the airline tickets and brought order to the vagabond life of a ski racer. He was the one who saw that the bills were paid and the house was in order while Shiffrin and her mother were away, often for months at a time.

He was the one in the finish area with the camera and the smile, ready to offer congratulations or encouragement. And his absence, especially at this first Olympics without him, can feel like a physical ache.

In her first World Cup season after her father’s death, Shiffrin found she no longer had the reservoir of energy that has always made her so fearsome. There were days she could barely crawl out of bed. There were races where she was so exhausted she wasn’t sure whether she’d make it through her second run.

She began working with a sports psychologist last year – “like doing squats for my mind” – and is finding things that bring her joy again. Her new relationship, with men’s super-G bronze medalist Aleksander Aamodt Kilde. Her brother’s wedding last fall. Her skiing, where hard work and diligence has always given her a north star.

But healing does not mean one has been made whole. Grief is not a linear process, and it can send you sideways in ways both unexpected and profound.

“I will try to reset again and maybe try to reset better,” Shiffrin said. “But also I don’t know how to do better because I’ve never been in this position before and I don’t know how to handle it.”

'Everybody's going to have an opinion'

Maybe this is giving the loss of Shiffrin’s father too much weight. Her struggles in Beijing might simply be another case of the Olympics being tough on the best skiers.

Marcel Hirscher is considered by many to be the greatest Alpine skier in history with eight overall World Cup titles, yet he has only three Olympic medals, two of them gold. Ingemar Stenmark and Lindsey Vonn won more World Cup races than any other skiers, 86 and 82 respectively, yet they, too, have three Olympic medals.

And those 2010 Vancouver Games, considered Vonn’s signature performance because of her downhill gold? She DNFd in three races there.

Or perhaps Shiffrin is like so many other athletes, who have found that the outsized expectations at an Olympics, coupled with the restrictions and isolation of COVID, are a burden that is simply too much to bear.

Even she doesn’t know for sure, or whether she’ll have it figured out enough to make a go of the remaining three races in Beijing.

“Probably better to ask some psychologist about that,” Shiffrin said wryly. “Everybody’s going to have an opinion anyway.”

But there seems to be more to this than either of those things. You don’t match the U.S. record for Olympic gold medals before your 23rd birthday, or win more World Cup races in a single discipline than any other skier, if you can’t hold a tight line.

Shiffrin is famously introspective, given to thinking long and deep about pretty much everything. If there is anything that will shake her, it is being at the whims of circumstances beyond her control. 

Like a schedule disruption that throws her carefully coordinated training plan out of whack, as happened in 2018. An injury or bout with COVID, both of which happened earlier this season.

The too-early death of a father, whose absence will loom large in every milestone moment for the rest of her life.

“Honestly, I’m at a loss,” Shiffrin said. “It’s hard to really know what exactly went wrong aside from I slipped up a bit on one turn, and I didn’t have enough space to recover from it.”

She was talking about the ski course. But it takes space to recover from grief, too, and maybe she just needs more of it.

Follow Paste BN Sports columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour.