Mikaela Shiffrin's performance at these Winter Olympics defies explanation. And that's OK. | Opinion

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BEIJING  – A really bad time for Mikaela Shiffrin to have a really bad time. 

That's all her oh-fer-the Beijing Olympics is. It's not a summation of her career, a sign she's lost her edge, a personal indictment or any of the other nonsense that is being cast upon her. 

It was a bad event. Nothing more, nothing less. 

“Right now,” she said Thursday, “I just feel like a joke.”

That's not a surprise, given the outsized spotlight Americans put on the Olympics and the even more outsized expectations there were on Shiffrin for these. A two-time gold medalist before her 23rd birthday, she was expected to be one of the faces of these Olympics, if not their biggest star.

That she is leaving without a single individual medal is shocking, particularly to her. 

In position to finally win her first Beijing medal after finishing fifth in the downhill portion of the Alpine combined Thursday, Shiffrin skied off the course some 10 seconds into the slalom run. After recording three Did Not Finishes over a four-year span, she had three in 11 days in Beijing.

She is one of the best technical skiers the sport has ever seen, with gold medals in both slalom and giant slalom. Her 47 World Cup wins in slalom are a record for a single discipline.

And yet she couldn’t finish a single tech race at these Games.

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“Even without seeing the video, I know that that was really good skiing,” Shiffrin said. “Anytime I’ve ever been so sure about something like that in my entire career, it’s gone pretty well. The track record with that kind of feeling on my skis, I never DNF.

“And now, I had a pretty good feeling on my skis two races in a row, on the same slope, and I DNF twice.”

But it does nothing to diminish what Shiffrin has already accomplished. Which is staggering. 

Prepared for 'a whole, chaotic mess of crap' from people

A month shy of her 27th birthday, Shiffrin already has a pair of Olympic gold medals and a silver, leaving her one shy of tying Julia Mancuso's record for a U.S. woman. Her 73 World Cup victories are third-most behind Ingemar Stenmark (86) and Lindsey Vonn (82). 

She has won three overall World Cup titles, the ultimate measure of success in skiing, and eight season titles across three different disciplines. 

By any measure, she's a success. And yet Shiffrin knows it won't be enough for some because she didn't pad the U.S. medal count here in Beijing. 

"I'm really disappointed and I'm really frustrated," she said. "I also know that there's going to be a whole, chaotic mess of crap that people are saying about how I just fantastically failed these last couple of weeks in the moments that actually counted. 

"And it's really strange, but I'm not even afraid of that right now," she said. "Maybe that's because I literally have zero emotional energy to give anymore."

Crap doesn't begin to describe it. Within hours of the race, Shiffrin was being inundated with vile, hateful messages on social media. She was called a narcissist, a choker and a dumb blonde, and referred to with expletives. She was told to retire.

"Cant wait for you to be done so we don't have to see your failure looser face," one person wrote. 

(Why is it, by the way, that grammar, punctuation and spelling are such a problem for the keyboard warriors?)

"Why do I keep coming back? Gosh knows it hurts more than it feels good lately," Shiffrin wrote on Instagram. "I come back because those first 9 turns today were spectacular, really heaven. That's where I'm meant to be and I'm stubborn as s**t.

"So let's go for some team even training tomorrow, and then the final Alpine race of this Olympics on Saturday." 

Shiffrin is one of the most introspective athletes you will find, naked honesty as natural to her as the trite cliches are to others. Refreshing as it is, it has also made her an easy mark for criticism. The long, reflective answers that are praised when she’s winning are deemed to be signs of a fragile psyche when she’s not.

She’s wound too tight. Overthinks things. Is unable to handle the pressure. Cares too much what others think.

But that doesn't quite square with her resume. If she were as delicate as some snipe she is, then how to explain all those World Cup titles and her many medals from the world championships and, yes, the Olympics?

Pressure and expectations are nothing new

Shiffrin better than anyone knows what she’s capable of, and she better than anyone knows when she doesn’t deliver. She was unsparing in her analysis of herself in Beijing, describing her performances in giant slalom and slalom as a “failure,” a word that has become almost taboo in sports.

“There are certainly points during the Games where I felt the weight of pressure and expectations,” she said. “But in general, when I was racing, it wasn’t the case. That wasn’t something outrageous and it certainly wasn’t more than I ever experienced in my career before.

“The pressure is there,” she added. “It’s always there, and I don’t feel uncomfortable or even unfamiliar with it.”

Maybe because sports is one of the few places in life without grey areas – your success or failure is obvious, measured by the clock or the finish line – we expect there to be an obvious answer when something doesn’t occur as expected. 

But maybe the answer is that there isn’t one.

These Games came along during a perfect storm in Shiffrin’s life and career. Her father died unexpectedly two years ago, and the loss remains devastating. She had a back injury early in the season that limited her training, and then spent 10 days in isolation after getting COVID in late December, an unheard of mid-season break for her.

None of these are excuses, and she didn’t use them as such. But maybe the convergence was simply too much.

Or maybe snow is just slippery, and Shiffrin hit a rough patch at the most inopportune time. It happens, even to the best of athletes.  

“Things were adding up to be just fine. It wasn’t like, `Oh no, everything is going so wrong and I have no chance,” she said. “There’s been challenges the entire way, but they didn’t give me a sign that things were not going to work.

“You can have preparation, you can have confidence … you can have all these pieces,” she added. “And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”

It’s not a satisfying answer, for Shiffrin and, she knows, anyone else. But it might just be the only one there is.

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