“Should just stop”
Shiffrin’s games just keep getting worse
02/17/2022 10:02 am
It’s just not supposed to be: Mikaela Shiffrin, the most successful skier of the present, is also eliminated in the combination and extends her Olympic nightmare. While the American fails, Switzerland celebrates a double victory.
Mikaela Shiffrin didn’t cry anymore, she just laughed. “I’m really disappointed and frustrated,” said the exceptional American athlete after her next debacle at the Winter Olympics in China. But somehow the whole thing just feels like “a joke”. After being eliminated early in the giant slalom and slalom, the 26-year-old also got in the 13th goal in the slalom of the alpine combination and did not finish. Not one technical run has brought her down the slope in these games so far. Instead, her medal dreams all went down the drain on the “Ice River” track. As in 2018 in Pyeongchang, the Swiss Michelle Gisin secured gold in the combination, in which no German athlete was at the start. Silver went to her compatriot Wendy Holdener, bronze to the Italian Federica Brignone.
Shiffrin, who has already won three Olympic medals in her career, went away empty-handed as a co-favorite in all individual competitions in China. Your only chance to take any precious metal with you is the team event on Saturday. “I can’t tell you how frustrated I am about not knowing what to learn from this day,” Shiffrin said after she lost the combination. She just couldn’t explain it. Of course she was under pressure here at the Olympics, she said. But it was not bigger than usual and therefore not the problem. Not even the longer break from competition and training that she had to take in December as a result of a corona infection.
“Should just stop”
After ninth and 18th place in the Super-G and in the downhill, the long-time alpine dominator in Yanqing seemed a little more stable than in the days before, when she had shed many tears. In the downhill of the combination she worked out a good starting position for the decisive slalom on the skis, which she had received from the Olympic silver medalist Sofia Goggia from Italy.
In her parade discipline, in which she has already celebrated four World Championship titles and a whopping 47 World Cup victories, she failed again. Shiffrin, the personification of consistency over the years, seems to have somehow lost his bearings in the Chinese pole forest. As if her compass, which used to lead her so reliably from success to success, had broken. “60 percent of the failures of my entire career happened here at these Olympic Games,” she calculated. “I should probably just quit,” she joked. Instead, she will train for the team competition. It is the last chance for a halfway conciliatory end to her personal Olympic nightmare.