A lot can happen in 12 years. If you’re Mikaela Shiffrin, as a teenager you can become the youngest ever person to win the Olympic slalom, stack a couple more medals at the next Olympics, become the most successful World Cup skier of all time with a record 108 victories, go 10 more Olympic races in a row over three Winter Games without reaching the podium, overcome the two biggest crashes of your career and subsequent battles with self-doubt and post-traumatic stress disorder and eroding trust in your own skiing, and then bring it all full circle with a second Olympic slalom gold.
You can also lose your dad.
Shiffrin, considered by many the greatest alpine skier in history, saw her incandescent career come full circle on Wednesday beneath the jagged limestone peaks above Cortina d’Ampezzo, winning her signature race by 1.50sec – an eternity in slalom racing and the largest winning margin in any Olympic alpine skiing event in nearly three decades – to end an eight-year medal drought that was starting to overtake the conversation. In 2014, at the age of 18, she became the youngest US woman ever to win Olympic gold in alpine skiing. Now, in 2026, she’s the oldest at 30.
Sports love clean and tidy narratives like these. The arc from teenage prodigy to veteran champion. The clean line from Sochi to Cortina. But grief is never clean. As the raw emotion bubbled over in Wednesday’s aftermath, a reflective Shiffrin described how winning her first Olympic gold since her father’s death in 2020 did not feel like a continuation so much as starting over.
“Everything in life that you do after you lose someone you love is like a new experience,” she said. “It’s like being born again. And I still have so many moments where I resist this.
“I don’t want to be in life without my dad. And maybe today was the first time that I could actually accept this like reality. And instead of thinking I would be going in this moment without him, to take the moment to be silent with him. It was just a little bit more spiritual than I usually am, but I’m really grateful for that.”
Jeff Shiffrin, an anesthesiologist and an avid recreational skier, was deeply involved in his daughter’s development from the beginning. But unlike many parents in the hyper-competitive world of elite youth sports, he was known for being calm, steady and perspective-driven. Shiffrin has often recalled how her father encouraged her to love skiing for its own sake. If she won, great. If she didn’t, well, that was part of the sport. The emphasis was always on effort, preparation and integrity.
“Part of my journey through grief has been challenging because I don’t feel this thing that a lot of people talk about, this deep spiritual connection,” she said. “People talk about feeling the presence, and I haven’t felt it in that way. I feel connected to him in my thoughts and in talking about him.”
For Shiffrin, moving forward wasn’t about resolving her loss but learning how to exist alongside it. For an athlete whose career has been built on precision and repetition, grief has offered no such structure. Some days feel manageable. Others feel impossible. The only constant, she said, is uncertainty.
“The only thing life can guarantee is it’s not something you can expect,” she said. “I’ve had moments I didn’t think I would survive. And in the end I get to stand here and talk about a medal. Life is crazy. I’m very grateful for that right now.”
That uncertainty had come to define her performance on the sport’s biggest stage. Fair or not, the narrative had hardened. Yes, she was great in World Cup races held mostly while America was asleep. Could she still do it under the most unforgiving spotlight?
Shiffrin didn’t medal in any of the six races she entered at the Beijing Olympics four years ago, reaching the bottom of the mountain in only half of them. And while she’d bounced back to win a fifth overall World Cup title across all disciplines the following year, there were some around the sport – herself included – who openly wondered if she’d ever be the same after a devastating crash two years ago in Killington, Vermont.
Those gnawing questions resurfaced in Cortina on her return to Olympic snow in last week’s team combined event. After Breezy Johnson crossed first in the downhill portion, all that stood between Shiffrin and a drought-busting medal was a single run in the slalom, where her glittering World Cup results this year – seven firsts and a second in eight starts – have already wrapped up her record-extending ninth season-long title. But Shiffrin was hesitant from the starter’s gate and finished 15th of 18 skiers, her worst result in a slalom race she’s started and finished in 14 years. Across the pine-dark slopes above Cortina, she could practically hear the critics: It’s easy to be the GOAT in a sport that no one is watching most of the time.
“I knew after the team combined that there would be some stories out there that would be really frustrating to look at,” she said. “These moments of challenge, you don’t necessarily get to avoid them. So I just didn’t look at what anyone was saying. I didn’t look at social media, I didn’t look at anything. I just talked with [my team] and kept reminding myself what was important was the moments between the start and the finish.”
She would performed better in Sunday’s giant slalom – the race she won eight years ago in Pyeongchang – skiing with renewed confidence and coming in 11th but only 0.30sec off the podium in an atypically tight contest. But Wednesday’s third and final event of her Olympic program, in the discipline that most embodies her brilliance, was Shiffrin’s last best chance of putting the doubts to rest.
She overcame a brush with disaster on her opening run down the Olympia delle Tofane track when she clipped a gate, but recovered to cross with the largest first-run lead in an Olympic women’s slalom since 1960. While attempting to go down for one of her customary naps between runs, her father’s reassuring presence was never far from her mind.
“I sort of started to cry a little bit because I was thinking about my dad,” she said. “And then I was thinking about the fact that I actually can show up today and honestly say in the start gate that I have all the tools that are necessary to do my best skiing and to earn that moment.”
After one more trip down the piste, the moment was all hers. Shiffrin is the first American skier to win three Olympic gold medals. The long wait between her slalom golds represents the longest gap between individual gold medals in the same event at the Winter Games. And as she found her mother and coach, Eileen, for a long embrace next to the finish area, the weight of the journey seemed to lift all at once.
A lot can happen in 12 years. Records fall. Doubts grow louder. Families are irrevocably changed. On Wednesday, Shiffrin did not close a circle so much as draw another line forward: two clean runs through the gates, one quiet moment at the finish, and the understanding that even the greatest careers are built not on certainty, but on showing up anyway.
