After record-setting sixth crystal globe, Shiffrin driven by curiosity

Mikaela Shiffrin had nothing left to prove.

Yet, standing in the Olympic slalom start gate last February, the GOAT of skiing didn’t feel like she was playing with house money.

“Even though it is just a ski race, it is also not just a ski race,” she said during a revealing 25-minute conversation at Copper Mountain last Saturday. Shiffrin introspectively analyzed last season and looked ahead to what’s next. With 110 World Cup wins to her name, it’s worth asking now how much longer the 31-year-old wants to dominate the sport.

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“It’s a really good question. What I know is that I’m not ready to be done yet,” she said before admitting: “I also feel different at this time this year than I have really in any other year.”

After a whirlwind post-World Cup tour that included stops in New York and then St. Louis for a Disney+ premiere of “On the Edge,” Shiffrin returned to Edwards, sleeping in her own bed for the first time in nine months. She heads to Mammoth, California for a ski camp this week. The cerebral skier, known for loving drills and running gates, said she’s excited to get back to work.

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“But I am thinking about what life has to offer beyond the sport,” Shiffrin added.

“Even things like this,” she continued, referring to her private ski day with members of elevateHER. “I want to be able to make the time to connect with the snow sports community.”

Fielding questions from 14-year-olds had Shiffrin regaling her own childhood tales, from how she started skiing down the driveway at 2 years old to longing for an electric go-kart for Christmas at 9. The kickoff for her $1 million fundraising initiative with ShareWinter also brought to the fore one potential aspect to her next chapter.

“My brother and sister-in-law just had a baby. So, kind of seeing all the opportunity,” she said. “That’s something I want. I know Aleks (Aamodt Kilde) wants that, too, but we have not been able to stay in the same place for more than a month at any point in our relationship.”

Shiffrin said she can’t imagine having a child right now.

“But,” she added. “I also can imagine that desire coming pretty fast and pretty suddenly.”

The former Ski and Snowboard Club Vail athlete is coming off a campaign for the ages. Shiffrin tied Annemarie Moser-Pröll for six overall crystal globes — the most for women. She still trails Marcel Hirscher’s all-time record (8) and Lindsey Vonn’s record for most total globes between discipline and overall crowns (20). But resume items aren’t what keeps Shiffrin coming back at this point.

“I think mainly it’s the curiosity about how much better I can get,” she said. After what she described as a “stepping stone type of season” in GS, Shiffrin is specifically interested to see if she can reach new levels in that event and super-G. As for her trademark discipline?

“I think I’ve reached my ceiling in how fast I can ski slalom,” she stated. “And I believe the other women on the circuit will continue to improve.”

Shiffrin went 9-for-10 in slaloms on the circuit, capping off her near-perfect season with a 1.32-second win at the World Cup Finals last month.

“I think the toughest thing about it was that the whole world — every headline, everything that anyone said — was, ‘expected to win,'” Shiffrin said.

That was certainly the case in Milan Cortina. Coming off the Beijing Games — where the American was favored to win gold in at least three of the six events she competed in, only to DNF in three and ultimately leave without any hardware — Shiffrin came into her fourth Olympics feeling significant pressure.

“You can be just slightly off timing and lose a second and a half,” she said. “The downside of that for me specifically is that the level of criticism that comes if I don’t win, and now by that much, is — at the Olympics, it kept me from looking at social media at all.”

Fearing “isolation,” Shiffrin’s psychologist held group sessions to foster empathy within the star’s inner circle.

“I started to explain a lot about what scared me about the Olympics, a lot of the fear of criticism, experiences I’d gone through in the past — both good and bad — and just how extreme I feel the Olympic environment is,” she said. “How much more heated and just the magnitude of it.”

In some ways, Shiffrin envied figure skater Alyssa Liu’s disposition.

“(She’s) like ‘oh, this is just so much fun, and I’m just having fun and it doesn’t even matter,'” Shiffrin said of the eventual women’s gold medal winner. “Because I’m like, ‘it doesn’t matter — but somehow it matters.'”

The internal pressure is tied to Shiffrin’s precise self-awareness of where her skiing can be if she checks every box.

“There’s my very, very best, highest-coordination skiing that takes every ounce of energy I have. And there’s the next level lower, which is literally at least a second and a half slower and it’s anybody’s race,” she explained.

“It gets to a point sometimes where, I just don’t have enough energy to do it. That was sort of the struggle or battle this season was getting myself psyched up to go out for every single slalom session knowing what it was going to do to my body.”

The cost-benefit analysis to go all-in includes her age. Shiffrin said skiing three consecutive days is hard now, whereas she used to easily go six in a row. Another factor is her desire to explore and expand off-snow opportunities, including her weekly podcast and involvement in the greater ski community.  

In the end, Shiffrin won gold in Italy, her second in slalom after becoming the youngest-ever winner back in 2014. Her three-career golds made her the most decorated U.S. alpine skier in history and the win also tied her with Julia Mancuso for the most total Olympic medals at four. Her margin of victory (1.5 seconds) almost exceeded the combined winning margins of the 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018, and 2022 Olympic women’s slalom races (1.51 seconds). 

The redemptive performance wasn’t lost on her fans.

“I feel like she knew she’d done so well,” said Team Monarch athlete Rose Lenth, one of the young 40 skiers who took part in the private event at Copper Mountain. “You could tell she was proud of herself.”

After spending the morning answering questions and the afternoon shredding and sharing tips on the hill, Shiffrin hoped to leave a two-fold message at the ShareWinter event. First, she believes the U.S. needs ski racers as well as people who just like to ski.

“We need to develop the pipeline — and we are — but we need people to just enjoy the sports for what they are,” she explained. “It’s something you can pass down for generations.”

Shiffrin also wished to pass onto youth the concept that hard work and fun aren’t mutually exclusive.

“You can dedicate your life to any kind of work,” she said. “You can be ambitious, you can try really hard, work really hard, you can set really lofty goals — and you can still have fun.

Both sentiments stemmed from her own upbringing.

“I would love to raise children with these kinds of qualities and tactics and passions that my parents had,” she said. “That was such a good experience for me.”

As she pondered the next stage — whenever and whatever that is — Shiffrin revealed something most fans might not be used to, given her proficiency carving up World Cup courses. The prospect of parenting leaves the greatest skier of all time feeling uncharacteristically unsure.

“Sometimes, the sort of dark side of my mind is like, ‘can you raise a kid the way your parents raised you?’ I want to replicate it and it’s not going to be the same,” she said. “What I really want, is to be myself growing up through my childhood again. I would love to relive that forever.”

Shiffrin’s curiosity clearly extends beyond the snow, where it “has been the driving factor.”

“At some point, I may feel like I’m just not curious anymore about any of it,” she said before a brief pause, as if she’d experienced a mini epiphany. “And that’s probably when I’m going to say, ‘alright.’ Because I’m curious about a lot of other things in life.”

“But the most important thing with ski racing is that as long as I’m going to do it I need to be fully fit, fully mentally immersed — mentally prepared, physically prepared — and inspired,” she said. “Curious about how fast I can go.”

Original reporting from vaildaily.com