‘So bold, it’s crazy’: Mikaela Shiffrin’s quest for Alpine skiing world domination

MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. — Alone in the darkness just before sunrise, Mikaela Shiffrin sleepily trudged up a snowy knoll toward a single light illuminating the hut where she would change into her ski gear. It was the first day of May last year.

A month earlier, Shiffrin, 22, had won the women's World Cup overall title, a grueling, 41-race competition that officially crowned her as the best women's skier on the planet.

Except many in the ski community thought otherwise, and Shiffrin knew it. Her doubters considered her a specialist who won the title by piling up victories in her best event, the slalom, the safest of five Alpine events.

Fearless risk-taking is what gives ski racing its sizzle, and fans of the sport have always saved their greatest reverence for daredevils who perilously charge down a mountain at 80 mph in aptly named races like the downhill. It is how Lindsey Vonn, widely viewed as the greatest women's racer ever and the skier against whom Shiffrin has been compared all her life, made her fame.

The rarest of skiers, however, have tried to conquer every event — winning the slower, more technical slalom and mastering the speediest, most treacherous races, too.

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Just as Michael Phelps set out to win a seemingly impossible eight gold medals in swimming at the 2008 Summer Games, Shiffrin has set her sights on something nearly as unfathomable: three, perhaps four, Alpine gold medals at the Pyeongchang Games, which began Friday in South Korea. Shiffrin's first event, the giant slalom, is Sunday night.

No Alpine skier, man or woman, has ever won more than three gold medals in one Olympics. No Alpine skier has won more than four Olympic gold medals in a career.

"What Mikaela is trying to do is so bold, it's crazy," said Sofia Goggia of Italy, a friend of Shiffrin's but also one of her chief challengers.

Yet doubts, sometimes biting, seem to fuel Shiffrin.

"I've had a lot of people tell me, 'Yeah, sure, you're good at slalom, but wait till you get to the real events like downhill or super-G,'" she said, her eyes narrowing. "I don't like hearing that."

And so, with the sting of such comments, the desire to build on her early track record of success and a lifelong resolve to be the pre-eminent racer of her generation, Shiffrin on that spring morning climbed the frosty hillside at Mammoth Mountain in Northern California, one of the few places in North America that still had ample snow in May. Most of the ski racing world was on hiatus, but not Shiffrin, who was taking the first step in a daring quest so outlandish it sometimes frightens her.

Shiffrin, the defending gold medalist in the slalom, will be the clear favorite in two events, a leading candidate to win a third race and a wild-card threat in a fourth. She may even enter a fifth event.

That is the plan, if she stays injury-free, even when the path forward is not always clear.

"The mornings are so dark," Shiffrin said at the bottom of Mammoth's trails last spring. "But at the top of the mountain, the sun comes up and below me I see my office come into view.

"That's where I work to become not just the best slalom skier in the world, but the best skier in the world. Period."

A winning history

Shiffrin, often a solitary figure on the mountain except for her coaches, hurtled headlong down Mammoth's ample, steep downhill terrain day after day.

One of those coaches is her mother, Eileen, who travels with her daughter on the World Cup tour and has helped shape her racing technique since Shiffrin was a toddler.

Eileen Shiffrin's uncommon teaching tactics have included having Mikaela ride a unicycle for balance and having her learn to juggle for coordination and concentration.

"My mom is one of my best friends but she's always had to play many roles," Shiffrin said. "She is, for example, the only one who is going to tell my coaches, 'OK, Mikaela's exhausted, let's all take a nap.'

"But my mom is also the one who told me on my birthday last March: 'Hey, we don't have time to go have a party. Stay focused.' There were a few races left in the season and that's when I clinched the World Cup overall title."

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In the eight months since her extended training in California, Shiffrin has quieted most of her critics with a startling, momentous winter of racing success.

She has continued a record-setting pace in slalom, winning seven of nine races. But she has also won two giant slalom events and had a second and third place in that discipline as well. She won a downhill race, defeating Vonn, and was third in two other downhills.

This season, she has yet to enter another Olympic event, the Alpine combined, which is a combination of one downhill run and one slalom run, but Shiffrin won the only World Cup Alpine combined she raced in last year, and she will be the favorite in the event at Pyeongchang.

In a fifth event, the super-G, a speedy, risky cousin of the downhill, Shiffrin's results have been less predictable, although she did have a top five super-G finish this season.

Shiffrin has slumped some in the last few weeks and failed to finish three races, but her lead in the season-long World Cup overall standings remains at 671 points, which is akin to having a 350-point lead in the fourth quarter of a basketball game.

Shiffrin is well aware that the Olympics — not her World Cup achievements — will be the yardstick against which she will continually be measured, at least by the majority of Americans who tune into ski racing only once every four years. That is fair, she says; she grew up watching the Olympics at home, too.

"After many of my victories, I hear people asking me these questions: 'What else is there to win?'" Shiffrin said as she sat in the quiet of a Vermont lodge between races late last year. "And I want to shout: 'What do you mean, what else? There's so much else!'

"I feel like I'm only a quarter of the way through what I can do. And it's an Olympic year, too."

Public poise, inner doubt

Although Shiffrin has emerged more triumphant than ever, she remains very much a work in progress, both on the snow and, perhaps as notably, when she is not on skis.

She is evolving in myriad ways — more inquisitive, cognizant of her vulnerabilities and subtly waggish. In public settings, Shiffrin is always poised, gracious, insightful and winsome, which is why she has become one of the most sought-after athletes in the buildup to the games. But privately, she said that she fights gripping self-doubt and abject fear.

"Sometimes I feel surrounded by this dark cloud and it feels like I can't breathe," she said. "It's nervousness and I don't know what else. Although I am starting to find a way to control it."

A year ago, she might vomit in pre-race hours. She has since seen a sports psychologist and learned some anxiety-averting techniques.

"I haven't puked this year," Shiffrin said, laughing, which she does often. "I picture the cloud and push it away. I'm finding ways to believe in myself even when I don't feel totally confident."

Shiffrin giggled before adding, "Of course, skiing really well helps, too."

But the new challenge of taking on the most dangerous, harrowing races has induced new tensions.

"I get scared a lot; I get scared when I do speed," she said referring to the downhill and super-G events.

Shiffrin continued: "For sure, in speed, I have a constant feeling that my heart is just five or maybe 10 beats above what it would normally be. There's definitely a little bit of a fear factor."

Nonetheless, the steely competitor deep within Shiffrin — she has been dominating her competition since she was 6 years old — has been adjusting. On the fly.

Even as a little girl, she wanted it all. It was in keeping with her upbringing in a family of high achievers.

Eileen Shiffrin was an intensive-care-unit nurse until she became one of Mikaela's primary coaches and her traveling partner seven years ago. Her father, Jeff, is an anesthesiologist.

Both Eileen and Jeff were accomplished ski racers well into adulthood. Unlike other families of top junior skiers, the Shiffrins, who had moved from Colorado to New Hampshire in 2005, frustrated their youth coaches by eschewing a heavy race schedule at major resorts in favor of incessant training at tiny, unadorned New England hills.

It was about repetition, not recognition.

"Some people called it focusing on process rather than results," Eileen said. "I called it common sense. Which way will make you learn more?"

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Mikaela became a racing marvel before she was half the size of the gates she was whizzing past.

By the time she was a preteen, Shiffrin had enrolled at the Burke Mountain Academy, a northern Vermont boarding school that has been a breeding ground for U.S. ski team members.

The headmaster of one of Burke's rival academies began calling Shiffrin "Mozart."

Shiffrin developed a preoccupation with a modern U.S. ski racing titan, Bode Miller. Not coincidentally, he was definitely not a specialist.

Miller is the last man to win a World Cup race in each of the five disciplines. At the time, he conceded it would be far easier to ski in fewer events but posed, "What fun would that be?"

When Miller's quote was read to Shiffrin late last year, she threw back her head and crackled.

"I loved Bode's approach," she said. "Once you start having success, it's easy to forget the mentality that got you started as a kid."

It also takes a special individual who is willing to tackle almost 40 races in a single winter — and still find the time for the herculean task to train for them at the same time.

Not only does each event require a different skill set, but the logistics of finding new training hills for each event every few days as the World Cup circuit hopscotches across Europe and North America can be overwhelming. Finding time for strength and conditioning sessions geared to the unique demands of each discipline can be vexing, and worse, exhaustion can set in, which is not recommended when roaring down a mountain at 80 mph.

Just lugging the necessary equipment is daunting, since an all-event skier can travel with more than 75 pairs of training and race skis.

"That's why I always thought Bode might be the last to do it and do it well," said Aksel Lund Svindal of Norway, an Olympic champion who still has only won World Cup races in four of the five events. "I'm in awe of what Shiffrin is attempting to do."

It is virtually impossible to draw parallels between other sports and the challenges facing an all-event Alpine skier. Each Alpine discipline is contested on a completely different playing field — a slalom course might be a few hundred yards long while a downhill course might cover 2 miles top to bottom.

Slalom skiers, racing at about 25 mph, must be nimble enough to make 60 precise turns in a packed, slick corridor of gates. Downhill racers must resist gravity and centrifugal forces that are two or three times their body weight to safely execute long, sweeping turns at 80 or 90 mph.

Shiffrin is not deterred by the enormity of the test.

"If all I did was the slalom, I'd have so much free time I might as well get another job, too," she said.

Fighting friction

Since Shiffrin was 7 years old she has heard people calling her, "the next Lindsey Vonn." In that context, one of the most obvious, yet tacit, implications of Shiffrin's decision to branch out to the downhill and super-G events is the understanding that she is now invading Vonn's territory.

Injuries have forced Vonn, 33, to concentrate on the speed events in recent years, so she has rarely crossed paths with Shiffrin in races or training.

The two rivals are friendly, and occasionally they make public appearances together where they take turns doling out praise for one another. At the same time, Vonn is certainly not ceding any ground heading into Pyeongchang.

"I see the youth all around me; I see the new wave," she said in an interview near her Los Angeles home in November. "But I'm definitely not done yet."

If the U.S. Olympic ski racing torch is about to be passed, Eileen Shiffrin believes her daughter is ready to take it.

"Mikaela has studied Lindsey carefully and watched how Lindsey handles all the many, public responsibilities she has shouldered," Eileen said. "It's one of the many ways Mikaela has matured since the 2014 Olympics."

Shiffrin was 18 when she became the youngest Olympic slalom champion during one of the final days of the Sochi Olympics. (In 2014, she had entered only two events, finishing fifth in her other race, the giant slalom.)

Since then, she has become internationally famous. Prize money and hefty commercial sponsorships have padded her bank account substantially, but she still lives at home with her parents outside Vail, Colorado. She now has a boyfriend, French ski racer Mathieu Faivre, although it is a long-distance relationship because the men's World Cup tour seldom intersects with the women's circuit.

Eileen and Mikaela have seemed inseparable for seven years on the World Cup, if not longer, but both say their relationship is changing. Eileen has thought for years about when she will no longer be an everyday presence in Mikaela's career. But for now, she said, the bigger task for both is finding the balance between being a coach and a parent.

"It's not easy, but my mom is the one who has to tell me what I'm doing wrong in training all the time, and some days I don't want to hear it," Mikaela said. "It's like calling a girl fat. It just gets under my skin."

Seated in the spacious, rented home that served as race headquarters for the Shiffrin team of coaches and ski technicians last year, Eileen smiled.

"Mikaela takes criticism more gracefully than anyone I know," she said. "But everybody has their limit. It used to create some friction back behind closed doors. It was quick and we always got over it. But I'm learning to go a little easier."

But there were rifts.

"Over the years, we've had times for sure where it didn't work, and we were not liking each other and not liking being around each other," Eileen said. "I would say: 'Wow, you know, maybe it's time for me to take a break. Or maybe I'll go home.' And sometimes I did."

At the start of the 2015 season, it was decided that Mikaela should go to Europe unaccompanied. She soon suffered the first serious injury of her career, tearing a knee ligament in a training crash.

"It has always turned out that we both missed each other so much," Eileen said. "We both feel like maybe it's not quite the right time to evoke an exit strategy. It will come at some point."

Always preparing

Two days after Thanksgiving last year, in front of a roaring sellout crowd at the Killington Resort in Vermont, and not far from her former home, Shiffrin did not win, finishing second in a giant slalom.

She smiled for the crowd, but walking away from the finish area, Shiffrin was irritated by her performance and determined to do something about it in the next day's slalom race.

First, though, she signed autographs and posed for pictures for 30 minutes. She conducted about an hour of news media interviews. She slipped into a tent for a mandatory drug test. When she emerged she visited with some of the dozens of family and friends who had come to see her.

Finally, just before 4 p.m., with the festivities continuing and about 11 hours after Shiffrin had set her morning alarm, she was whisked to another, distant part of the Killington ski area.

As dusk began to sweep over the mountain, she scurried up a mound to a little lodge where she pulled slalom pads onto her arms and shins, donned her slalom-specific helmet and then dashed to the ski lift where she was the only person ascending to the top of a trail that had been set with 50 gates.

From the bottom of the course, Shiffrin was barely visible as she sped downhill, but she could be heard. Her hands and shins smashing through the gates created a furious cacophony that echoed off the evergreens lining the trail.

Shiffrin took two forceful yet deft runs through the course and considered a third. But looking back up the mountain, she realized the descending darkness was obscuring all but a handful of gates.

The next day, in the final race of the holiday weekend, Shiffrin routed the field.