Mikaela Shiffrin On Winning, Failing and Grief:
OLYMPIC SKIER MIKAELA SHIFFRIN KNOWS SHE MIGHT NEVER STOP GRIEVING
THE SUDDEN 2020 DEATH OF HER FATHER, JEFF. AND SHE’S OK WITH THAT.
Two-time Olympic champion Mikaela Shiffrin has opened up about the mental health issues she suffered since the death of her father and says she is still unable to explain
how she came away from this year’s Beijing Winter Games without a medal.
The 27-year-old American detailed in a lengthy and deeply personal essay on
The Players Tribune the extent of her grief at the loss of her father and how it
still intruded into her life on a daily basis.
Expanding on the subject of mental health, the multiple world champion broached the subject of her disappointing form in Beijing, where she came nowhere near a medal despite competing in all disciplines.
“People always ask me, ‘What happened in Beijing?’,” she wrote.
“They want some kind of answer. And I genuinely don’t have one.
“I could give you the media answer that I always give.
I could put on a brave face and tell you some generic thing. But the real truth is… I don’t know. “It’s two minutes of your life. Two minutes, on a random day. You go down the hill. You try to go fast. You try not to make mistakes. Sometimes, you win the gold, like I did. Sometimes, you fail, like I did.”
Shiffrin said she did not want to ski, eat or sleep after her father’s death in an accident in February 2020, likening the loss to “an injury in your soul”.
She won the overall World Cup title in March following her Beijing disappointment but said that did not mean that all her personal issues had suddenly disappeared.
“People would say things to me like, “Mikaela, now that you’re in a much better place…” she added.
“And I never said it out loud, but I would always think: ‘Am I’?
“We equate winning with being okay, and failure with being not okay.
The real truth is that I’m neither okay nor not okay. It really depends on the day,
and it has almost nothing to do with how fast I came down a mountain.”
She had taken gold in giant slalom and silver in alpine combined at the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, and she finished just off the podium in slalom. When you fail at the Olympics, there’s no private time for reflection and processing. Instead, there are cameras from every major international news network, in your face, immediately. And there are questions.
What happened? What went wrong?
After those Games, Shiffrin, now 27, had acknowledged that her aspiration
to win a gold medal in each of the five individual events was lofty—perhaps impossible. But ahead of Beijing, she was a favorite to at least make the podium in most of her races.
Instead, we all know what happened. Shiffrin recorded a “did not finish” in her first event, giant slalom—for the first time since January 2018, breaking a 30-race streak.
Then, in her second—and best—event, slalom, she took another DNF.
Shiffrin finished her third race, the super-G, placing ninth—an accomplishment considering how top-heavy that field of women is and the fact that it’s not Shiffrin’s
best event.
As she continued to learn to shift her perspective and find the positives in her experience in Beijing, Shiffrin headed into her fourth event, her Olympic downhill debut, focused not on medals but simply on skiing her best. Finishing 18th, then, on a day with difficult conditions, was a win.
In her fifth individual race and last chance to win a medal, alpine combined, Shiffrin started out strong, in fifth place entering the slalom portion following the downhill portion. But the medal was not meant to be; she recorded her third DNF in five events.
In her final event, the mixed team parallel, Shiffrin and the U.S. just missed the podium, finishing in fourth. “It’s not always easy, but it’s also not the end of the world to fail, fail twice.
Fail 5 times. At the Olympics. (Enter me …),” Shiffrin tweeted after her final individual race. “Why do I keep coming back? Gosh knows it hurts more than it feels good lately.
I came 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.”
And then, a month after the Olympics, Shiffrin was back on top of the world again.
She clinched her fourth World Cup overall title, winning that coveted crystal globe to
tie fellow American Lindsey Vonn for the second-most all time.
COURCHEVEL, FRANCE: Mikaela Shiffrin of Team United States wins the globe in the overall … [+] GETTY IMAGES
Shiffrin has experience with living out her life’s highest and lowest moments in
the public eye. Almost exactly two years before the Beijing Games’ opening ceremony,
her father, Jeff, had died after suffering a head injury in an accident at home.
Shiffrin has been navigating the unpredictable journey of grief—which she stresses
is not a linear one—publicly, redefining her relationship to skiing in the process.
In an intimate essay published by The Players’ Tribune on Thursday, Shiffrin discussed
all of it more candidly than she ever has before. Hers was the first essay in the site’s new Signature Stories series, which seeks to transform the traditional cover story into a 360-degree view of the athlete, combining first-person essays with original video, audio and photography.
The day before her essay was published, I spoke with Shiffrin—who is used to having her story being written about, not penning it herself—on the phone about what it was like to have more agency over her narrative and what she hopes readers take away from her piece.
“I just tried to explain the emotions that I go through from a more human perspective
than what people see me as—Mikaela Shiffrin the Olympian, the ski racer, the World Cup winner,” she said. “There’s common misconception that as an athlete, as long as you’re winning everything’s OK, and if you’re not winning, everything’s not OK. With this piece, it’s been so much about being able to put into words and tell the story that sort of goes against that theory.”
In the beginning of her career, Shiffrin says—when she was racking up titles and world championships, winning her first World Cup race in December 2012 at age 17—her emotions tended to go in line with success and failure. “Everything made a lot more sense,” she said. “It’s much different now.”
As she dealt with the fallout of losing her father—and as, after a few months,
she started to feel that the world had begun to move on without her—Shiffrin found it helpful to realize that others who came before her had experienced pain, sadness and
tragedy and loss and had somehow come out okay.
“Not necessarily come out on the other side,” Shiffrin said, “but have just continued
to go through life and have good moments, knowing it’s possible not necessarily to
be OK but to find happiness, even though it’s not a linear process.”
In writing her essay, Shiffrin hopes to be that example for someone else—proving that, while loss and tragedy might never actually be overcome, it’s still possible to continue building a life and setting goals.
At the same time, there’s a little bit of apprehension that comes with sharing her experience so widely. Someone out there is probably going to read the article and it might strike a chord and help them through something, she says, but many others might be stuck on the concept of “you’re the one who’s supposed to help me escape my life.”
The recent examples of other athletes and Olympians—like Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka and Michael Phelps—who have spoken out about their mental health struggles have been welcomed by many, but not by all. After all, Shiffrin says, sports is entertainment—it’s understandable that the public would look to athletes to forget about their own struggles.
Elite athletes are almost expected to be robots—to consistently dominate, to never disappoint. They’re allowed to show emotion if it is the type of emotion we have prescribed for them.
“You can’t forever brush aside everything else that’s going on in your life and opinions you have and things you see,” Shiffrin said. “You build this platform if you succeed in sports and you start to realize all the things in life you care about, at least for some of them,
you may be able to have an impact if you speak up.”
What she never wants to hear, Shiffrin stressed, is that experiences like the Beijing Olympics prove that she’s “just” human. “We’re all ‘just’ humans,” she said.
“That’s actually a pretty beautiful thing, if you don’t put the word ‘just’ in front of it.”
Now the competitive skiing season is over, Shiffrin has time to slow down and think about her goal-setting—for her training in the off-season, for the season to come, for the rest of her career. For so long, she says, her only goal in skiing has been simply to continue.
Of course, she can’t lie and say that, with 74 World Cup wins, the thought of overtaking Vonn (82) and Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark (86) for the most all-time hasn’t crossed her mind. It’s close…but it’s still far enough away that it could never happen. “That record is not going to be the thing that defines my success in my career, ” Shiffrin said.
“It’s already been successful—but I’m still here and still doing it.
As I keep skiing in the next season or so I’m almost on a journey to find out
what the goal needs to be and what my career is going to look like moving forward.”
And just as grief is not linear, progress isn’t, either, Shiffrin said. “In my case the grief is probably never going to go away; it doesn’t mean that you can’t have wonderful times and things to look forward to in your future.” And when it comes to goals, sometimes it’s not about designating some outcomes as “successes” and others as “failures.”
The most important thing is to keep doing it.
“That’s what I hope people take away—the main point to tell this story is that sometimes it’s as simple as getting out of bed and putting one foot in front of the other,” Shiffrin said. “You don’t have to succeed every single day—you won’t succeed every single day. Sometimes all you’re doing is trying, and sometimes that’s enough.”
In an emotional essay published by The Players’ Tribune on Thursday, Shiffrin offers new details and perspective on her grieving process over the past two years, and how it has impacted her on the slopes. She describes grief not as linear “like a climb up a mountain,” but rather “more like a maze.” And winning, she writes, is no antidote.
“After Beijing, when I turned things around and ended up winning the World Cup,
people would say things to me like, ‘Mikaela, now that you’re in a much better place…’
And I never said it out loud, but I would always think: ‘Am I?’ ” Shiffrin writes in the essay.
“We equate winning with being OK, and failure with being not OK. The real truth is that I’m neither OK nor not OK. It really depends on the day, and it has almost nothing to do with how fast I came down a mountain.”
Shiffrin, 27, has won three Olympic medals and 12 World Cup titles but is coming off
a disappointing performance at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, where she was favored to
win multiple medals but finished no higher than ninth in any of her individual events.
She proceeded to win the overall World Cup title in March.
Shiffrin writes in The Players’ Tribune that she still doesn’t know what happened
to her at the Olympics. “(People) want some kind of answer. And I genuinely don’t have one,” she writes. “I could give you the media answer that I always give. I could put on a brave face and tell you some generic things. But the real truth is… I don’t know.”
Shiffrin does suggest, however, that her father’s death has changed her mindset during competition. She writes that she struggled “just to not feel guilty for doing the thing that he loved to do.
“When I knew that I had a chance to win my first race after his death, I had this really surreal moment at the top of the mountain before my second run,” Shiffrin writes.
“I knew that if I had a good run, then I’d win. But if I won, then I’d be winning in a reality where my dad isn’t here to experience it. And I was asking myself,
‘Do I want to even exist in this reality?’ “
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Olympic skier Mikaela Shiffrin pens emotional essay on ‘maze’ of grieving father’s death
Mikaela Shiffrin gave insight into how she navigated the grief following her father’s death, and she may never stop grieving, something she is O.K. with.
“It’s not linear. It’s not a climb up a mountain,” Shiffrin wrote in an essay published by
The Players’ Tribune on Thursday. “It’s more like a maze.
Some days, I feel O.K. Some days, it still feels as raw as when we walked into the hospital after our 10-hour flight home and saw him on the ventilator.”
Shiffrin’s father suddenly in February 2020 after an accident, and she detailed the call she and her mother received, the emotions she felt during the 10-hour plane ride and the nine hours she laid with him in the hospital as he was on a ventilator.
But going through the pain of recounting the memories with him,
his influence on her skiing and his death have a purpose.
“It’s extremely hard to relive this pain, but the reason I’m doing it is because
maybe it can help someone else. I’m doing it because someone did it for me.
A stranger, as a matter of fact,” Shiffrin wrote.
The Olympic gold medalist detailed how people highlight feeling “endless sadness
of losing that person, and the ‘celebration’ and happiness of remembering their life.”
However, there is anger as well. She wrote, “It’s like you have an injury in your soul.
There is no timetable. There is no rehabilitation. Some days you wake up and think,
“What’s the point?”
Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad.
“I’m Not at Peace With It”: Mikaela Shiffrin on Coming Back After the 2022 Olympics in Beijing | Vanity Fair
Olympic skier Mikaela Shiffrin pens emotional essay on ‘maze’ of grieving father’s death | Flipboard
Mikaela Shiffrin Writes Emotional Essay on Navigating Father’s Death – Sports Illustrated
Mikaela Shiffrin On Winning, Failing And Grief: Sometimes Trying Is Enough (forbes.com)
Mikaela Shiffrin pens emotional essay on grief, father’s sudden death (usatoday.com)
I Want to Remember Everything | By Mikaela Shiffrin (theplayerstribune.com)
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