US Olympic skier Mikaela Shiffrin finds her joy in the process rather than from the prizes that result

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Part of Paste BN's 10 to watch series profiling some of America's top athletes competing at the Beijing Olympics

Of course Mikaela Shiffrin wants to win.

That’s the point of being an elite athlete, isn’t it? To go faster than everyone else. To beat the person next to you. To pile up the statistics and results that are the easiest and most obvious measures of success.

For Shiffrin, though, winning is the byproduct. Like the student who relishes the grind more than the grade, she is more interested in the things that go into making her one of the best ski racers of all time. The mechanics. The angles and edges. The tactics. The repetition. The searching for the tiniest of flaws and figuring out how to fix them. The fascination with the hows and the whys and the what ifs I did this instead.

That that painstaking attention to the details – what others might consider drudgery -- has resulted in Winter Olympic gold medals, world titles and international commercial appeal is just a bonus.

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“The overarching thing that allows me to ski fast and be one of the best racers in the world and get all the titles and all of these things that feel really great and make you feel like you’re a hero and you're on top of the world and all that, the thing that lets me do it is skiing well. And that's the thing that I actually enjoy doing,” Shiffrin told Paste BN.

“Anybody who had the chance to break records and have their name written in the history books and all of these pieces, nobody's going to say, `No, I don't really want that.’ That's going to be incredible if it happens,” she said. “But that's not something that has defined my career. To this day, the thing that I enjoy the most, more than racing or anything else, is just going out and skiing really well and making improvements.”

Which makes the Olympics something of a conundrum.

Mikaela Shiffrin sets sights on gold

Just 26, Shiffrin already has two Olympic gold medals and a silver. A medal of any color at the Beijing Games would tie her with Julia Mancuso for most by an American woman, and two more golds would match the Olympic record held by Kjetil Andre Aamodt of Norway and Janica Kostelic of Croatia.

Shiffrin has said she hopes to race all five events in Beijing – slalom, giant slalom, super-G, downhill and Alpine combined. Given she is currently ranked No. 1 in both slalom and giant slalom, and in the top five in the other three, she has to be considered a medal favorite in every race.

But the unpredictability of the Olympics is at odds with Shiffrin’s exacting preparation.

At the Pyeongchang Olympics four years ago, Shiffrin’s hopes of competing in all events were blown away – literally – within the first few days. The giant slalom and the slalom were postponed due to high winds, forcing Shiffrin to skip both the super-G and the downhill.

There isn’t a lot of flexibility to begin with in the Olympic schedule. The men and women are both trying to fit in five races over the course of 16 days, as well as a mixed team event. Postpone even a couple races, especially near the beginning of the Games, and the domino effect can be ruinous.

Switching between the speed and technical events requires more than just changing skis, too. The physical demands of the races are different. So, too, the mindsets with technical events requiring the precision of a diamond cutter while the mentality for speed races is more hair on fire, go for broke.

A technical specialist early in her career, Shiffrin still takes a deliberate approach to the speed events. If she can’t build a solid training base before a speed race, something that wasn’t possible in 2018 because of the schedule upheaval, it simply isn’t worth the risk.

“Everything went wrong,” Shiffrin said of Pyeongchang. “A normal World Cup race would have been canceled (because of the wind). But we're going for it because, at the end of the day, it is the Olympics and they’re trying to host hundreds of different athletes across so many different sports in a two-week time period.

“There's no one place on earth that could do that and make every single competition as perfect as it could be.”

And then there was everything else. Shiffrin won gold in the giant slalom, and the medals ceremony was held that same night. She didn’t get back to the house where she and her family were staying until 10 p.m., then had to be up for the slalom race early the next morning.

Between the lack of sleep and the stress from the uncertainty earlier in the week, Shiffrin was exhausted. She had what was, for her, a lackluster first run and wound up fourth, missing the bronze medal by 0.48 seconds.

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While the result was shocking – she had won the slalom title four of the previous five years, the outlier due to an injury – it was not the end of the world. She still had a gold medal, and would add a silver in the combined later in the Games.

But the national pride brought out by the Olympics, making diehard fans out of people who had only vague knowledge of these athletes and sports a few weeks earlier, can prove toxic as well. Shiffrin found herself bombarded by criticism from people who were incensed she had not delivered the results they expected.

“I was getting a lot of comments of people saying, 'Don't come home if you’re not bringing home a gold medal,’” Shiffrin recalled. “I was thinking, I do! If that’s your argument, I do have a gold medal. But they didn’t necessarily know that. They didn't necessarily watch the giant slalom race. They might've only been tuning in for the slalom because I was supposed to win.

“So there's all of these different pieces, and I can't control literally any of this.”

Olympian stays true to her values

Shiffrin is not only one of the most introspective athletes in any sport, she is one of the most honest. There are no cliched answers from her, no soundbites tailored to fit the image she and/or her sponsors are trying to project. She is grounded by her tight-knit family, and their support allows her to maintain a sense of normalcy amidst her success.

But even she has struggled with how to manage the expectations that others have for her. Shiffrin knows the only opinions that matter are those of her family and friends, including boyfriend Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, the overall World Cup champion in 2020.

Yet she can’t help but be affected by the criticisms of people she will never even meet. People who would go slack-jawed if they actually did meet her, asking for a selfie instead of sniping at her.

“My career and who I am as a human being is so, so far removed from the two weeks that we spend in Beijing, racing for gold medals and doing that whole thing,” Shiffrin said. “And as important as that is to me and how much I care about it, I don't care about it more than being true to my values and loving my family and just working as hard as I can on a daily basis. Those are what's guiding me on a daily basis.

“Whether a gold medal is part of that or not – it's incredible if it is, but you can't let that be tied to your self-worth, because it's not. And it'll ruin you if you let it become something more than it is.”

She believes she has become better at tuning out the noise, at rolling with the turbulence rather than allowing herself to be rocked by it.

“Having that (mindset) and speaking it out loud is different than actually practicing it as well,” said Mike Day, Shiffrin’s longtime head coach. “Obviously that’s the hope, that she’s more bendy than she used to be and more open to controlling the controllable and letting other stuff go.

“It’s never been put to the test as far as that, I would say.”

Not on a mountain, at least.

Tragedy strikes: 'No joy in her successes last year'

Shiffrin’s mother, Eileen, is one of her coaches, an essential part of her team. Though her father Jeff, a physician, stayed mostly in the background, he was no less vital to her success.

He was the one who booked flights and paid bills. He was the one who made sure the house was in order, knowing where the fuse box was and how to replace the water heater if it broke. He was the one who took care of all the little things, making it possible for his daughter to do all the big things.

But on Feb. 2, 2020, Jeff Shiffrin died unexpectedly after a fall at the family’s home. The sorrow that enveloped Shiffrin, her mother and older brother was all-consuming, and his death left a void in their lives that felt more like a chasm.

They were all still in a fog of grief when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, essentially shutting down the world. Even if Shiffrin had wanted to resume training, she couldn’t. Every part of her life had been upended, and she was powerless to do anything but sit with the pain and sadness.

A back injury further delayed her return to the World Cup circuit. When she did finally come back, in November 2020, she continued to struggle under the weight of her grief.

Shiffrin had always been able to summon a next-level intensity, particularly for her second runs, and now it was gone. She was exhausted, in both body and spirit. Her three World Cup wins were her fewest since her first season on the circuit, and her 10 top-three finishes were half what she’d had during her historic season in 2018-19.

“It was definitely tough to watch, from these historic seasons to a point and time where she couldn’t perform the way she used to,” Day said. “We had the pandemic, so we were not preparing in the way we normally would. We had the tragedy, obviously, which was a significant break from racing as well as just completely changing the balance she had mentally and physically.

“The success she had in that season, after the tragedy, for most professional athletes would have been amazing,” Day said. “(But) every success last year still felt sad. There was no joy in her successes last year.”

But grief is a process, too, and that timeline that can’t be rushed. Two years after her father’s death, the sadness of his absence lingers but it is no longer all-consuming. A sports psychologist has helped Shiffrin manage her emotions – “Basically like doing squats for my brain,” she said – so they don’t sap her physically.

And as anyone who has lost a loved one knows, eventually you find a way to live with that loss. To be happy again and even find joy in the new normal. Shiffrin’s brother got married last fall. Her relationship with Kilde is both a comfort and a source of delight. She is again at the top of her game, setting a record in January for most World Cup wins in a single discipline with her 47th slalom victory. 

The win was her 73rd overall, leaving her 13 shy of Ingemar Stenmark's record. 

“Soelden this year was the first time it felt like she was extremely excited for a race but she was also pleased with her performance, a great outcome and she was happy,” Day said, referring to Shiffrin’s win in the season-opening giant slalom.

“It took that time to find the space to compete in and be comfortable with.”

Will that translate into success in Beijing? Time will tell. But it's also besides the point. The meaning for Shiffrin comes from all the things she does, and what she learns when the world isn't watching.