The first half of 2018 was remarkable for Mikaela Shiffrin. During the season that began in late 2017 and concluded in the spring of 2018, she podiumed 18 times and won 12 World Cup races in three of the sport’s four disciplines. Her three downhill podiums — including a win in Canada and a stunning third on the tough Cortina, Italy course — silenced doubters about her ability and progression in downhill and Super-G.
Shiffrin then won a gold and a silver at the Olympics in South Korea and wrapped it all up in March by taking the world overall crown for the second year in a row.
And yet, Shiffrin struggles under the mantle of greatness. Fans, sponsors, media, and Shiffrin herself, have come to expect evermore podiums. Even in a golden year like 2018 — where she clobbered the field in the final slalom of the season, beating the second-place finisher by almost two seconds — she feels like she could have carried more speed, won more medals, taken more risks. Just more.
At least, this is the way some see it. The end of 2018 came with a smattering of ho-hum reactions from the press and some fans. In the weeks leading up to the Olympics, Shiffrin had been set up as a possible five medal winner. Only two?! Bah, c’mon!
Shiffrin herself, in a recent interview, concedes both annoyance at the criticism and a touch of disappointment with her Olympic results. Although pleased with her skiing in the three events she entered, she chafes when she recalls the weather challenges, the ensuing schedule changes (which led her to skip the downhill and Super-G), and the resulting inability to achieve more medals. She also believes she and her team made some miscalculations in the weeks before the Olympics, leading to ill-timed fatigue at the onset of the games.
Shiffrin at the ESPYs held this July in Los Angeles. The skiing star made time for red carpet events this summer, including attending the French Open final and the Cannes Film Festival. Image Credit: GEPA
The 2017-2018 season nevertheless puts Shiffrin, at 23, in the constellation of greats of alpine skiing. Only one other female skier in the 52 years of World Cups has won more World Cup races in a single year, just one of among several of her astonishing records. What’s more, she’s on track to win more World Cups than anyone, ever (another expectation).
The curious thing is, if you consider what captures where Shiffrin is in her life, and in her growth as a modern-day competitor, you do not find it in the gates; rather, you find it after the season ended, when she accepted invitations to enjoy some fun in the Caribbean with her boyfriend, and then to attend the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity followed by the French Open finals in Paris.
“There’s a balance I’m starting to find, and that I’m ready to find, between the work — doing my job on snow and doing my job in the gym, always with the focus I bring to my sport — and saying to myself ‘I want to do this, I want to have that experience,’ ” Shiffrin said in a recent interview.
“The point that I am in life is great,” she emphasized, then adds: “But if it was two years ago I probably would have said ‘no (to Cannes and the French Open), I have to be home and do my workout program and I can’t travel during that time and I can’t do that extra media.’ But, I’m starting to take advantage of those opportunities now because they’re things I would love to do and I would have done (in the past) in a heartbeat if I had not always had that nagging thought that by doing something fun like going to the French Open I’m not doing my job.”
Shiffrin has been a sparkling figure at the summit of her sport for several years now. But in the run-up to the 2018 winter Olympics and through this summer, her star has shone like never before. Major stardom is now a huge part of her job. She’s the first person to acknowledge that it’s both a wonderful, fascinating seductress — certainly a tantalizing aspect of the crown she’s been fighting for her whole life — and a massive distraction from what got her there and what she needs to do stay on top.
It’s been coming for some time, but Shiffrin unquestionably now has massive power — marketing power, mentoring power, and, lately, sex appeal power. The U.S. Ski Team wants some of it, the media wants it, Longines and all her other sponsors want it, too.
Shiffrin won the overall World Cup globe this season, for the second year in a row. She is on track to become the greatest skier of all time. Image Credit: SRM/Susie Theis
Adding it all up can be dizzying. In France this past spring, she served on a panel of sports marketing experts at the Cannes Festival, considered the largest annual global gathering for the advertising and creative communications industry. And at her appearance at the French Open in Paris in June, she sat in with NBC as a star athlete commentator.
Also, this spring she was one of three athletes named to Maxim’s Hot 100 (in the magazine’s own words), its 2018 pick of 100 “smart, powerful women who are breaking boundaries (and looking damn good doing it).” This recognition came as she was nominated for the Teen Choice Awards, Nickelodeon’s Kids Sports Choice Awards, and two ESPY’s, which she attended in a sparkling off-white dress as a presenter in Los Angeles in July.
All this as she appeared on newsstands everywhere on the cover of Adweek magazine for an appropriately timed and headlined piece entitled “Mikaela Shiffrin: Turning her winning streak into marketing gold.”
The Shiffrin we’re seeing in 2018 is embracing and enjoying the spotlight like never before. She’s shedding her girlish shyness, becoming more deliberately open and public, both with the press and with her fans. On her exceptionally earnest, insightful and often intimate Instagram feed, she shares openly: you’ll find gratitude, disappointment, goals, vacations, workouts, training travel to Chile and Ushuaia. And, you’ll find her boyfriend — another public first — French ski racer Matthieu Faivre. Yet another passion occupying big chunks of Shiffrin’s schedule.
The last piece of Shiffrin’s 2018 evolution involves another best friend, a key leader of her athletic team, and a pillar in her development and success as an athlete: her mother. Eileen Shiffrin’s significant and central role in her daughter’s life is shifting, slowly but steadily.
What seems clear these days is that long phase of Shiffrin’s career where everything was in service to the pursuit of going faster and winning again and again, is shifting. Don’t be mistaken, Shiffrin’s laser-sharp singular focus has not diminished. Getting ever faster and stronger and winning predominate — “if improvement stops, I quit,” she says. But she’s increasingly making more time for other interests and passions, both because she wants to and because that’s what being a champion and a star, and making money in sport, demands.
So, how will it go from here?
In an intimate three-hour conversation with Ski Racing this summer, Shiffrin reflected on her journey so far, what she’s learned along the way about her approach to the sport and about being a champion, and what she believes she can realistically accomplish in the year ahead.
A stunning fact of Shiffrin’s career is that every season has felt bigger than the one before. There have been few lateral moves, few pauses, and no major injuries.
Shiffrin’s record is astonishing. At 18, the youngest slalom champion in Olympic alpine skiing history; by winning her second Olympic gold medal in 2018, in the giant slalom, she tied Ted Ligety and Andrea Mead Lawrence for the most Olympic gold medals ever won by an American in alpine skiing; she’s one of only five Americans to ever win the World Cup overall title; she has won 43 World Cup races, which puts her fifth among all female alpine skiers and 10th among both men and women, which at such a young age puts her on a track to be the winningest ever.
Shiffrin with (left to right) Adam Rippon, Abby Wambach, Ibtihaj Muhammad, Natalie Morales, Jussi-Pekka Kajaala and Jennie Thompson at the Cannes Festival. Photo: Megan Harrod
What drives her entering this season is what has driven her always: fear, fear that there is a handful of racers who could beat her on any given day; and ambition, ambition to be the greatest. There’s also the satisfaction of getting better every year, which even at her level, she believes is happening continually. Good thing, too, she says, because so is everyone else.
As a youngster, she watched Bode Miller winning in all disciplines. “That’s something I saw and was inspired by. His versatility. I want to win in all the events, too. To be the best in the world requires that I be the most versatile.”
And yet, Miller’s kind of versatility might elude her, she concedes, in part because she is somewhat risk averse, or in her words, “one of my mottos is: control the variables”, which means she and her team are immensely careful to craft her schedule to manage her fatigue, especially when it comes to racing in all four events. This sort of calculation is what led her to skip the Olympic downhill and Super-G.
“Bode (Miller) and Lindsey (Vonn),” Shiffrin notes, “might have been able to handle that kind of schedule leading up to the Olympics.” They’re what Shiffrin calls “miraculous hero skiers. I’m not. I don’t put myself in the category of heroic, miraculous skiers.”
Shiffrin sees herself more in the northern European — that is to say strategic, calculating— model of ski racers. There are the Ingemar Stenmarks Gustavo Thonis, and Marcel Hirschers of ski racing, then there are the Alberto Tombas, Bodes, and Lindsey Vonns.
“If people see me as a miracle skier, I’m not. If I look like a miracle skier, it’s because I train hard, and work hard,” she says, adding, “You have to take your path and you have to believe it.”
Shiffrin continues: “It might be impossible for me to ski all the disciplines at the level that I want to ski them. I’m coming to terms with the reality that I might never be considered a champion speed-skier speed queen, certainly not the way that Bode was and Lindsey Vonn has been.”
And yet, the fire of ambition burns hot in Shiffrin, and she is going for speed-event wins.
“It’s coming. I do think I can win more speed races, and I realize it’s going to take a lot of time. How much I’m willing to take from tech is the question.” It always is.
Shiffrin’s ambition is to win the big ones, Cortina being at the top of the list.
The Cortina hangover
As it turns out, Cortina this past season was a turning point. A challenging one, and a learning moment.
She came in to Cortina on a winning streak and a high. “I never thought I was super human, but I started having this belief that it could just keep happening miraculously. I was going to keep having this incredible success. I lost sight of that model of making sure I am in control of all the variables, fatigue being one of them.”
The decision to race all three speed events at Cortina just three weeks before the Olympics sent her into a tailspin. She believed she had the experience and the confidence to handle the Cortina week. She was wrong. Her lack of speed experience simply made the Cortina week an exhausting turning point into a slump that lasted for almost a month. It ended with the gold in the giant slalom at the Olympics.
“It took so much mental energy to memorize that downhill track in Cortina, and then to execute,” she said. “That beat me up; it totally beat me up.”
She podiumed at one of the three Cortina races, third in the downhill, but then went on to DNF in three of the next World Cup races.
“I’ve never done that in my career, three DNFs in a row. The mental and physical energy Cortina took… The whole stress of a speed week put me over the edge.”
Shiffrin races her way to Olympic gold in February. At 23, she is tied for the most Olympic gold medals ever won by an American in Alpine skiing. Image Credit: GEPA
The Olympics
Shiffrin arrived in South Korea depleted and in a slump. In her parlance, she had not properly controlled the variables.
Then the winds kicked up and the goal of five medals went out the window as the race schedule got jammed up, prompting her to drop out of the Super-G and downhill so she could be rested and ready for the combined event.
“I have so many mixed feelings about it (the Olympics),” she said.
The Super-G ended up being run the day after the slalom, which would have been Shiffrin’s ninth day in a row of racing and training, including both the tech races. She was tired. It was too risky.
“I just said to myself: ‘I think that’s a much bigger risk than it is going to provide any sort of reward. I’m tired, and if I’m tired I might fall, and if I fall I’m probably going to get hurt.’ ”
Downhill training began right after the Super-G. Still feeling off her game, she felt uncomfortable in training and just couldn’t adjust to the track, she said. After the third day of training, she pulled her name from the race.
“We have an incredible speed team, and I wouldn’t have earned that (downhill) spot if I had taken it. Other athletes deserved it: the speed athletes who had worked for that speed spot and didn’t have other opportunities the way I did. That was their shot. That was what I was thinking about as well,” she said.
Shiffrin now looks back and thinks she made the right call all around, because four Americans ultimately finished in the top 15 in the downhill.
“When I watched that downhill I literally felt relief that I didn’t race it because I knew if I had taken one of those spots I wouldn’t have done it justice.”
At the Olympics “I wanted to enter all five events, but it just wasn’t to be for me. I could see Bode entering all five in that Olympics and he is the kind of athlete who could have medaled in all five, or he could have crashed in all five. That’s how he approached it. That’s not me. That’s the risk you take when you put all those variables into play.”
“In the end I walked away thinking that (a gold in the giant slalom, a silver in the combined, and a fourth in slalom) was really successful.”
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How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard? – Winnie The Pooh
Critics, social media and sponsors
In the wake of the games, Shiffrin endured a new kind of criticism.
“American Mikaela Shiffrin couldn’t outski her own expectations, or ours,” was the Washington Post’s headline over a story by Barry Svrluga.
“American skiers fall short of expectations,” said NPR.
“Mikaela Shiffrin won gold and silver but expectations were higher,” read the caption under a picture of Shiffrin in the Bleacher Report.
In a list of winners and losers from last season’s World Cup, Ski Racing columnist Scott Lyons didn’t include the name Mikaela Shiffrin. He was, he explained on social media, picking out the exceptional, taking “note of the less obvious but more interesting aspects of the season.”
Some fans fumed. No Mikaela? But Lyon’s point of view was not so far-fetched. Despite her record season, Shiffrin skis for a country weaned on the devil-may-care Bode Millers and Lindsey Vonns. Shiffrin’s steady rise to the top feels oh so calculated and strategic.
To that, Shiffrin says, most people just don’t understand what it takes to win. It’s in her nature to take comments from the bleachers to heart. She’s also increasingly learning to process them, assess them, and move on.
“People don’t see what’s going on, people just don’t understand. But I’m not letting it get to me.”
Social media
She does care about her fans and her sponsors. A great deal. Anyone who follows Shiffrin on Instagram recognizes this. Her entries to her 601,000 followers, frequently seen by hundreds of thousands, are often long and heartfelt, explaining this or that decision in her schedule, her life, expressing her gratitude to friends, family, colleagues and fans, her latest workout ideas, training trips, pre-race thoughts and jitters. You name it; it’s there.
A self-professed shy person as a kid (a confession made on Instagram), who wasn’t comfortable outside her family or making small talk, she’s now clearly breaking out. She’s a meticulous, careful Instagram poster. Her entries, which she says sometimes take hours to write and edit (she does them all herself), are devoid of all the usual grammatical errors and typos.
“I care what people say and what they think, I never want to let go of that completely, that’s my personality. And I want people to know I care.”
Being hyper public is also a requirement of the job, the part that generates huge money. Her sponsors, from Longines to Barilla, Oakley to Atomic, require a steady stream of media posts (this is all spelled out in contracts), in addition to all sorts of other public appearances. Yet sponsors create a paradox.
“They want me, they want my time,” she says, “but they’re not that interested and don’t really understand what it takes athletically to win races.”
What it takes is hard work away from all that sponsor stuff — in other words it takes time, something that seems increasingly in short supply now that Shiffrin is at the summit of the sport.
“All of the things we look for as marketers, in an athlete to potentially be paired with a brand, she has,” Erin Weinberg, who scouts talent for brands, told Business Sports Daily leading up to the Olympics. Weinberg heads up sports, entertainment and communications at United Entertainment Group. Shiffrin, she said, “is talented, she’s got a great attitude, she’s well-spoken, she’s smart, she’s attractive and she performs under pressure at a very young age.”
How Shiffrin juggles all this going forward will be something to watch.
“The most important thing is for her to perform, and she can only perform if she has enough time in the day for training,” Shiffrin’s manager Kilian Albrecht told Business Sports Daily. “We need to limit all the other commotion.”
Mom
Among the people Shiffrin consulted before pulling out of the Olympic Super-G and then the downhill was her mom, Eileen. Few decisions, big or small, are made without Eileen Shiffrin’s input. She’s been at her daughter’s side always. That’s going to change for the upcoming season. Just how much remains to be seen.
Mikaela Shiffrin is careful not to make too much of this change; her mom’s role has always been somewhat fluid. When she was a teenager on the World Cup circuit, traveling with teammates twice her age, she needed her mom as a friend and someone with whom she could retreat and relax.
Eileen and Mikaela Shiffrin at the Flachau World Cup in 2013. Shiffrin credits both her parents with her work ethic and said, “If it were my mom in my position she would have won many more races.” Image Credit: GEPA
“I remember telling my parents I can’t do this without one of you,” Shiffrin recalled. “Her (Eileen Shiffrin’s) role in my program has always been shifting; she wears all the hats: best friend, mentor, coach, mom, manager, sports psychologist.”
And, adds Mikaela, Eileen Shiffrin is good at all of them. The proof is in her daughter. “There are many times when none of them (the other members of her team) can do the job as well.”
There’s a pause in conversation and Shiffrin adds: “My mother and father have taught me so much. They have such a methodical, precise work ethic. That’s where I get it. If it were my mom in my position she would have won many more races.”
Sports-world parents would pay dearly to fully understand Eileen Shiffrin’s magic. Clearly, she did a lot right. There’s a book deal there for sure.
What is known is that this season Eileen Shiffrin will be less present than she has been in the past. Mikaela Shiffrin is carefully managed by the U.S. Ski Team — “I might be the best managed athlete on the tour,” she says — and her mom now has other important responsibilities.
“She’s taking care of my 96-year-old grandmother in Massachusetts,” Mikaela said. “She’ll be splitting her time between there and the World Cup.”
2018-19 goals
For the coming season, Shiffrin is aiming for greater consistency in giant slalom, and more speed starts and success in speed. Her schedule — in other words, what races she will enter — will be something to watch, as it will reflect her aims, how she intends to manage fatigue and, in her words, “the variables.”
At this point, she will reveal only that she intends to enter every tech race except for perhaps the parallel slalom “city” races, and “sprinkling in speed races when it makes sense.”
Her goals? Setting records and winning the biggest races, which is why you can expect a return to Lake Louise, for a confidence boost, and the Cortina speed week, as a marquee event.
“I will judge the coming season the way I always judge a season: results and the accumulation of points and my standing at the end of the season. But this season I’ll be looking for results in speed.
“To be the top name in skiing, that’s something that’s developed over the years, especially as a result of the Olympics. But for this season, it’s all about putting up giant slalom and slalom results, being a contender in Super-G and downhill, and the overall globe.”
About the Author: Biddle Duke
