MILAN — In her third and final opportunity to medal at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, Team USA superstar skier Mikaela Shiffrin ended her struggles at the Olympics during two emphatic runs Wednesday that earned her gold in slalom.
Shiffrin stormed down a Cortina d’Ampezzo course with nearly 600 feet of vertical drop to finish in 47.13 seconds after her first run, 0.82 of a second ahead of the rest of the field. In slalom, skiers take two runs and the times are combined to determine medals.
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Four hours later, Shiffrin stood at the starting gate for her second and final run, knowing she was less than 51 seconds away from her first medal since 2018.
It was by no means guaranteed. The second-to-last rider before Shiffrin broke a pole halfway down the course. And the skier immediately preceding her, Germany’s Lena Duerr, who was in second place after her first run, hooked the first gate and immediately stopped her run within seconds.
Shiffrin’s final run, in contrast, was a surgical performance that left her pumping her fist over her head at the finish line.
Starting in perfect rhythm, Shiffrin had a one-second lead over Camille Rast of Switzerland, the reigning world champion, one minute into her run. Entering the flat portion of the course, that lead had grown to 1.5 seconds.
Into the final gates, Shiffrin bobbed and weaved until crossing in 51.97 seconds, for a combined time of 1:39.1, 1.5 seconds ahead of Rast, and 1.71 seconds ahead of bronze medalist Anna Swenn Larsson of Sweden.
Her winning margin was the largest in any Olympic Alpine skiing event since 1998.
"The skiing is what I cared about and of course, medal and [win] gold, I mean, that's a dream come true," Shiffrin told NBC. "But at some point this week, I just said, like, 'Stop dreaming, just ski.' This whole time has been waiting for two times 45 seconds today to be able to ski, and I'm so happy to be able to do the right thing in the right moment."
Asked whether it was the "storybook ending" for which she had hoped to cap her journey back from disappointment and injuries, Shiffrin said, "I don't even think we're 5% of the way through the book.
"This feels like a really big moment," she said. "It's just part of it. ... It's part of the journey."
For Shiffin, it was a golden coda to an Olympics in which success had been elusive.
For all of her dominance across Alpine skiing, including a record 108 World Cup victories, Shiffrin had missed out on medals in 2022 and had begun the Milan Cortina Olympics by finishing fourth in team combined and 11th in giant slalom. Those results left her to post on Instagram this week that “my skiing in the first race didn’t come together the way I visualized. I fought for every hundredth and didn’t totally find the right execution. This was certainly cause for some disappointment.”
Her prospects for medals at these games were uncertain because she is not yet two years removed from a November 2024 crash during a giant slalom race that left her with a puncture wound in her side and what she has described as crash-induced post-traumatic stress disorder.
Yet if there was ever a golden opportunity for Shiffrin to shine in Cortina, it was in slalom, her strongest event. Of her 108 World Cup victories, 71 have come in slalom. At the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Shiffrin — then 18 years old — earned the gold medal in slalom to become the youngest skier ever to win. Wednesday's win means Shiffrin, 30, is now the youngest and the oldest U.S. woman ever to win an Olympic gold medal in Alpine skiing, according to NBC Sports research.
Hours after winning gold, Shiffrin posted on social media that she had won "in the face of fear and adrenaline and the potential for criticism and backlash from people who know nothing and don’t even try to understand."
"I won. I stood in the start gate, and looked out at the mountain and the course ahead and my heartbeat nearly fell out of my butt. Still, when the countdown started, I pushed. I pushed to chase, I pushed to earn. I pushed to dare and to dream. I pushed to believe."
Shiffrin flashed that massive amount of talent again during Wednesday’s first run when she grabbed a sizable lead.
In a post-race interview with NBC after her first run, Shiffrin said that she was “a little bit on the limit” but described the run as “really clean," and said her focus was solely on what she had to do between her start and finish.
Shiffrin's family and friends, including her mother, Eileen, celebrated in the grandstands at the finish line as her gold became a certainty. Shiffrin told NBC that she began her celebration by thinking about her father, Jeff, who died in 2020.
“This is a moment I’ve been pretty scared of for a pretty long time, because ... every new experiences in life is an experience that he’s not here to see, not in person,” Shiffrin said. “And I figured, might as well have a spiritual, spiritual moment and just, I don’t know, just think about him.”
