SUN VALLEY, Idaho — It would be understandable if Mikaela Shiffrin had let herself wallow.
The last few years have been, to put it simply, rough. The sudden death of her beloved Dad. The struggles at the Beijing Olympics. The knee injury that cost her a chunk of last season. Then, in late November, the crash that cost her a chunk of her obliques as well as valuable time on the World Cup circuit.
But pity parties aren’t Shiffrin’s style.
More introspective than most, athletes and otherwise, Shiffrin tries to remind herself that, yes, she’s had challenges. But she’s had some really wonderful experiences, too. Like getting engaged to fellow skier Aleksander Aamodt Kilde. Setting the record for most World Cup victories, a mark that now stands at an almost unfathomable 100 wins. Watching her teammates thrive and become medal-contenders themselves.
“Everybody’s dealing with something,” Shiffrin said in an interview with USA TODAY Sports ahead of Thursday’s slalom race at the World Cup finals.
“I think the harder thing about this season has been the peaks and valleys,” she said. “I tend to operate best at more even keel, even emotionally. But when it’s extremely good moments and extremely bad moments, that’s what really takes all of my energy to just manage it.”
Shiffrin arrives at the last race of the season in a good place. Or at least on an upward trend again.
She has spent the last week in Sun Valley getting some valuable training time, including in giant slalom. The crash earlier this season occurred during the second run of a giant slalom in Killington, Vermont, and Shiffrin didn’t race GS again until late February, acknowledging she was having PTSD.
But she’s had fewer and fewer symptoms, and is getting closer and closer to feeling like her old self.
“The last few days of training, I’ve been able to take on the speed and the tempo of a course a bit better,” she said. “I’ve had some training days going really fast and I’ve had training days where I’m not so fast, but all within reason.”
Even the GS race earlier this month in Are, Sweden, when Shiffrin skied out in the first run. It was a disappointment because the DNF cost her a chance to race the GS here and boost her position in the season standings.
But it was also a win because of how she felt.
“That whole day, my warmup runs leading up to the race, everything was really in a good place,” Shiffrin said.
“Being able to show up to a race and mentally take it on and feel like I was pushing from the start and feeling like I was processing things and … being able to take in all the chaos and all of this different feedback and all this different stimulus and be able to mentally file it in the right place, that was really rewarding,” she said. “After everything that the place my mind has been all season is, that was huge.”
Even if it wasn’t reflected in the end result.
“Normally we base our progress (after an injury) off the result of a race. That’s the test. That’s what tells you, ‘OK, you’ve actually done good work and you’ve done this well,’ ‘ Shiffrin said. “But coming back from this injury, we’ve had to sort of separate from the result entirely and just focus on the little rewards throughout the day.”
The missed races, along with struggles in her first attempts at racing GS post-crash, dropped Shiffrin in the season-long points standings. That has the potential to add an additional challenge at the start of next season, because start positions are based on where you are in the standings.
The higher up in the points you are, the better your start position. The better your start position, the more chances you have for good results.
The more good results you have, the better set up you are for the Milan-Cortina Olympics.
“We can’t get those points soon enough,” Shiffrin said. “So I’m kind of clawing tooth and nail in slalom to secure a better spot on the start list for GS.”
But worrying, and wallowing, won’t change the math. So Shiffrin instead chooses to focus on the training she’s done this last week, looking at it as her first prep camp for next season. She got to do some testing of her GS equipment. She got some quality runs in both GS and slalom.
She might have been behind at the end of this season, but she’s ahead for the next one.
“That’s been helpful to just kickstart my motivation for the summer,” Shiffrin said.
Which is big, given that next year is an Olympic season and the expectations on Shiffrin will, once again, be immense.
Shiffrin already has three Olympic medals, two of them gold. She is the all-time leader in World Cup wins and podium appearances, and she set a world championships record last month with her eighth gold, winning the team combined with Breezy Johnson.
Anything Shiffrin does in Milan-Cortina will only burnish her legacy, rather than defining it.
But skiing, like so many other Olympic sports, only gets the general public’s full attention every four years. Those two weeks loom large, even if athletes try and see them as any other races, and no one is more conscious of that than Shiffrin.
Her uncharacteristic struggles in Beijing, when she posted DNFs in three races, resulted in a torrent of online abuse.
“There is pressure around the Games,” Shiffrin said. “I want to be able to say that I’m just doing this for me and it’s just for fun and everything, but the fact is we all feel pressure. There’s not a lot in the world that feels like holding up a gold medal. Or any Olympic medal. It’s the culmination of a lot of work.”
If these last few years have reinforced anything, though, it’s that her career is a gift. The good, the bad, the heartbreak, the triumph — they’re all interwoven.
“I’d love to be able to go to Cortina next year and take the mentality that it’s more of a privilege and more of an opportunity than it is pressure,” Shiffrin said.
The balance required to be a successful athlete and a happy human aren’t that much different. Shiffrin has mastered both.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.
