The American was thrown off track by the death of her father. Now she drives with the naturalness of earlier days and conquers all speed specialists in St. Moritz.
Everything indicates that Mikaela Shiffrin has found her way back completely.
There is this disrespectful saying in racing: Driving like a ski instructor – nice, but no chance. But Mikaela Shiffrin manages to combine elegance and efficiency. Your rides could be shown to any ski student as an instructional video and yet they are irresistibly fast. As a child, her parents encouraged her to play a variety of sports, and she skied the roughest slopes so often on her short skis that today she makes everything look easy as a game. For example on Sunday, when the technician distanced all the speed specialists in the Super-G in St. Moritz.
The American conquered the big world of sport at a breakneck pace. At the age of 17 she won the World Cup for the first time, three months later she was world champion and at 18 also Olympic champion. All of this with unbelievable naturalness and the smile of a child on your face. She was considered the Mozart of skiing. In an interview with the “NZZ am Sonntag” in 2014, she said that she actually visualizes her runs to music and then tries to implement the rhythm on the slopes. “My best races felt like dancing to me, like expressing myself to music.”
Every meter on skis is associated with a task
But she is not a child prodigy. «What I have achieved is above all the product of a lot of work.» Her father once said that his daughter never skis for pleasure, for example in powder snow. Every single curve on the boards is associated with a specific task – even if it slides from the lift to the start house. What is easy to forget: Even Mozart as a boy did not just play for fun, his father drilled him.
Shiffrin seems poised to break every skiing record imaginable. Almost ten years to the day have passed since her first victory. In St. Moritz she celebrated her 77th World Cup triumph – she is only 9 wins short of Ingemar Stenmark’s record. In 226 races so far, she has been on the podium 123 times. In her trophy cabinet there are 14 international medals, 4 large and 8 small crystal balls. And she’s still only 27 years old.
But the brilliant record is deceptive, there was a big break in Shiffrin’s career. On January 26, 2020, she won a Super-G in Bulgaria. Shortly thereafter, she was told that her father had been in a serious accident back home in the United States. The daughter traveled home with her mother, who always accompanied her in the World Cup. They were able to say goodbye to Jeff Shiffrin on his deathbed.
It wasn’t until the following winter that Mikaela Shiffrin started racing again. She said that she had trouble keeping her head on the matter, her thoughts kept going back to her late father. In the summer she even asked herself whether sport could still be her life at all. The lightness of the past few years was gone, victories became rare.
Shiffrin was at the top of the podium three times in the season after the personal drama, and she also won World Cup gold in the combination. And every time she was shaken by emotions, spoke of the father that she missed. What the world only found out later: That winter she fell in love with the Norwegian racing driver Aleksander Kilde. The two became the dream couple of the ski circus, but above all, the relationship brought confidence back into the life of the ski queen.
Shiffrin matures as a personality in drama
Shiffrin also matured humanly during this time. She began expressing herself personally and politically on social networks instead of just posting beautiful pictures. She spoke out in favor of tightening gun laws in the United States and campaigned for “Black Lives Matter”. And when her critic told her to keep quiet and win, she vehemently defended herself.
In terms of sport, the former child prodigy regained his footing. Shiffrin won the overall World Cup for the fourth time in 2022, but won only five times and was not the best in any of the individual disciplines. The winter games in Beijing showed how fragile she still was. The US media did the usual hype, Shiffrin entered all the competitions and, of course, it was rumored back home that she could win five golds.
She failed terrifically, in the technical disciplines she even dropped out in the first run. Shiffrin then talked into the microphones for a long time and was convinced that she would grow from these defeats. Now everything indicates that she has actually found her way back completely.
Although the competition has caught up, she herself is driving with the calm and focus of earlier days. In St. Moritz she won a Super-G for the first time since that dark day in Bulgaria. A circle has been closed – the future can begin.