Mikaela Shiffrin wanted to perform Sunday for another huge crowd at Copper Mountain that turned out to cheer on the home state heroine in a World Cup slalom, but she wanted them to know they came through for her in a big way, too.
Feeling heavy legs from jet lag, travel fatigue and a demanding giant slalom at the highest elevation on the women’s World Cup the day before, Shiffrin posted the fastest times in both runs and claimed her 104th World Cup victory by 1.23 seconds. She has dominated all three slaloms this season.
“It was about as hard as I thought it was going to be — just a lot of fatigue in the legs,” said Shiffrin, who arrived here from Europe on Monday. “The crowd completely carried me down the hill. Even from the start, when I hear people cheering, sometimes I feel pressure. Today, the louder they were, the harder I pushed — just let them take me down the hill.”
She was nervous, too, not just because she didn’t want to let down a Colorado crowd estimated at 11,000 that included hundreds of young girls pressing up against finish corral fencing and cheering for all they were worth. She knew it was going to hurt. She compared it to facing a grueling interval workout, knowing it would be painful, ignoring the temptation to back off and pushing through with everything she had.
“You know it’s going to be terrible,” she said, “and you have to do it anyway.”
Holding records for World Cup wins and World Cup slalom wins (67), plus seven world championships gold medals and three Olympic medals, she still yearns for excellence at age 30.
“I don’t know how she stays so motivated,” said her mother, Eileen, one of her coaches. “I almost feel like she’s just conditioned to go out and ski the best she can possibly ski. That just seems to be her baseline. She still gets really, really nervous at the races.”
She burst onto the scene in 2013 as a world slalom champion from Vail at age 17, then became the youngest Olympic slalom champion (18) at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. In those days, she talked a lot about focusing on process rather than results. It was something her late father, Jeff, preached relentlessly. Therein lies the source of her motivation even now.
“Honestly it’s the same, it’s process,” Shiffrin said. “I am so obsessed with the feeling I get between the start and the finish when it’s good. It’s not like anything, you can’t even explain it to people. It’s just such a beautiful feeling. And, when I can improve that a little bit, that’s motivating. To anticipate it, to visualize it and then to execute it, and to actually get to the bottom and see that it was indeed well done, that’s like the best feeling.”
She has that in slalom, but she’s searching to regain it giant slalom. In October she was fourth in the season’s first GS in Soelden, Austria, and she was 14th in Saturday’s GS here. The women’s Olympic GS looms on Feb. 15. Getting back to top form in GS will be, yes, a process, and it’s also a top priority.
“It’s going to take time,” Shiffrin said. “Yesterday (Saturday’s GS) was some mix of relief and excitement, to be in a place where I can fight for tenths and hundredths and adjustments in a GS. That was just a cool feeling.”
A year ago at Killington, Vermont, she crashed hard in a giant slalom and left the resort in an ambulance, having suffered a puncture wound in her abdomen that would keep her out of action for two months. She raced only one individual event at the world championships in February, finishing fifth in slalom, skipping the GS.
She joked about that Sunday: the difference between last year’s World Cup giant slalom/slalom weekend for the women in the U.S., compared to this year’s.
“We’re walking away from the U.S weekend, and I do not have a puncture wound,” she said wryly. “That is just super nice.”
Not that there was much doubt, but she officially qualified for fourth Olympics with Sunday’s win.
“It is pretty incredible,” she said. “When you’re at the top of sport, some of these things become like an expectation. When I can say I’ve qualified, that’s a huge step, and we have to celebrate those moments.”
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