BEIJING — Mikaela Shiffrin and I have very little in common. She is a she. I am not. She is blonde. I am not. She is in her 20s. I’m — uh, not. Further, to be exceptionally obvious, she is a very, very good skier. I am not. Frankly, I am quite terrible on skis, and it’s something of a joke in our house that if I never, ever go on skis ever again that would be super OK. Why do you think I moved from Chicago to California?
You don’t, however, have to be a very good skier to appreciate very good skiing. Shiffrin is, without question, and with all respect to Lindsey Vonn — whom I have known for nearly 15 years — the greatest female skier in the history of Planet Earth. Not hyperbole. Even Bode Miller says so. “I’m a huge fan,” he told Ski Racing. “She’s the best racer that I’ve ever seen, male or female.”
One of the things you learn after writing for these many years about what separates the best from the rest, what makes someone an Olympic champion, is that at this level everyone has physical ability. The difference-maker is mental. One, the best hate to lose even more than they want to win. Two, they have an almost preternatural ability at go-time to be calm, almost zen. That is the being-in-the-zone thing.
Mikaela Shiffrin at a World Cup race in December // Getty Images
This brings me to the one thing that Mikaela Shiffrin and I do have in common. Stay with me here, please, because here comes some unsolicited therapy talk. Disclaimer: I am not professionally qualified to be anyone’s therapist. But, you know, I have been in therapy myself. And, as noted, I live in California. So all good.
To get serious:
When her Beijing 2022 racing schedule gets underway, with the giant slalom Monday — assuming the weather holds — will Shiffrin, can Shiffrin, be as mentally and emotionally right as she can be?
The story of her past two years has been dominated by the death of her father.
Shiffrin lost her father, Jeff, on February 2, 2020. He died in an accident, of a head injury, according to the Eagle County, Colorado, coroner. He was 65. She was 24, a month away from 25.
My father was killed on September 14, 1983, in a plane crash outside Pittsburgh. He was 50. I was 24, a month away from 25.
For sure, it has been many more years since the loss of my father. He was an elected public official, a county judge in Montgomery County, Ohio, around Dayton, and the crash was front-page news. I have rarely written about it.
Shiffrin, of course, is the most public of public figures. She has been remarkably open in talking about the impact of the loss on her, her brother, her mother and others. She is, as this tweet shows, still clearly — and understandably — missing her father.
Grief is an intensely personal and sometimes very weird and inexplicable thing. It takes unpredictable turns. Sometimes those turns can bring great solace, even peace. Sometimes — not. Who knows? Sometimes you think you’ve got it all handled, and you’re moving on. And then, maybe at the most inopportune moments, it can appear from seemingly nowhere. Who can possibly know why? Life is a mystery.
I am the oldest son in a family of four boys. All four of us, it would turn out, did a math game without telling the other three. Each of us silently calculated the day we outlived dad. Only when the youngest of the four had done so did he admit to the math — and then the other three of us said, wait, you did that, too?
The thing is —we all get a short ride in this life. It’s not just a mystery. It’s up to each of us to make it a beautiful, enchanting, joy-filled mystery, filled with love, family, friends, community, making a difference somehow, someway.
Recognizing that there is so much beauty and enchantment, and surrendering to it and its possibilities — feeling grace and gratitude each and every day for the blessing of being alive — is the pivot.
This brings us to Monday’s race and, indeed, Shiffrin’s Beijing 2022 program.
For that matter, it brings us to the broader conversation around athlete mental health that has emerged over the past several months.
Shiffrin freely admits to — let’s call it great focus. Control would be another descriptor. She has used that word, too.
Actually, “super-controlling over everything that’s happening in my life.”
In the lead-up to these Games, Shiffrin has had a back problem. She got Covid. And, of course, hanging over everything — the loss of her father.
This was her coach, Mike Day, in an Associated Press story previewing her approach to the 2022 Games:
“If we’re doing our jobs, we shouldn’t have to do anything special for her to feel right and for her to feel comfortable.”
“Everything that we can control, we’re controlling, and trying to stay ahead of every little thing, whether it’s making sure she’s not walking up too many stairs, whether it’s making sure there are not too many steps in a day, making sure there’s a nutrition option that’s convenient and handy or that she can eat in her room if the dining room is too crowded. Or just another stressor. Truthfully, you don’t want to suddenly get to the Olympics and change what you’re doing, right?"
To be 100 percent clear, Mike Day knows way more about skiing, and about trying to make Mikaela Shiffrin get mentally right, than I do.
So maybe what’s next is way off base.
But making sure there are not too many steps in a day? That she’s not walking up too many stairs?
You don’t need to be Mike Day — you only need common sense — to know that alpine skiing, of all sports, is perhaps least susceptible to control of any sort. Speeds in the giant slalom reach 50 mph. If you ski it like Shiffrin, or the way Ted Ligety used to, your body is sometimes literally parallel to the course — that is, to the ground. The course is not fluffy snow. It’s ice. The edges of your skis are as sharp as razor blades. This is as big-time as it gets, with races won or lost literally by hundredths of a second, and the light, the shadow, the course itself — it’s all deliberately unforgiving.
In PyeongChang four years ago, Shiffrin had to contend with weather delays. It did not go well.
Of course, to say that is crazy, but that’s this game. She had declared expectations for medals in as many in five events. She won “only” two.
Can we reframe, please? In 2018, Shiffrin won two medals, one gold. That’s great! Please. It’s awesome.
This note: the men’s downhill Sunday, the first scheduled alpine medal event of Beijing 2022, was delayed because of high winds. Hmm.
More in the expectation game: Shiffrin is probably the only skier the casual American fan will have heard of. Heading into the women’s competition here, she leads the women’s overall World Cup standings, just ahead, 17 points, of Slovakia’s Petra Vlhova. But — there’s always a but — Shiffrin stands third in giant slalom points, behind Sweden’s Sara Hector and France’s Tessa Worley.
Shiffrin’s last race before the Games was a giant slalom at Kronplatz mountain in the Italian Dolomites. She finished — fifth.
Shiffrin’s best shot at Olympic gold, just as in PyeongChang, is most likely the combined. It’s not on the World Cup calendar this season. Shiffrin won the combined at last season’s world championships. The slalom, long Shiffrin’s money event? Sure. She might win. She could win. But she has a real rival, Slovakia’s Vlhova, who is a clear No. 1 in the World Cup slalom race, with 660 points; Shiffrin stands No. 2, with 440.
Ski racing is a confidence game. Especially at the Olympic Games. Plain and simple.
Will Mikaela Shiffrin have it? That’s the question.
Once more, for better or worse, I have had many more years of dealing with the loss of my father than Mikaela Shiffrin. There is not a day that goes by — still — that I don’t wonder what it would have been like if he had lived. Each and every day, I wonder.
All the same, our lives go on. Life itself goes on. The trick, as Bruce Springsteen says, can seem so complicated but it’s really so simple: it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.
Especially now. We are in a pandemic. The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that, owing to the Omicron variant, the world is sicker than it has been in 100 years — over the past month and a half more people have gotten sick than any similar period since the 1918-19 flu pandemic. In the United States, 900,000 people have died from the virus; it was way back in September that the Covid-19 pandemic became the deadliest disease event in American history, surpassing the 675,000 dead from the 1918 Spanish flu.
Let’s recall the wisdom of the swimmer Katie Ledecky at the Tokyo Games not even six months ago. Ledecky had come in fifth in the 200 freestyle, the first time she had not won a medal in an Olympic race, then bounced back roughly an hour later to win the first-ever Olympic women’s 1500 free. After that 1500, she told reporters, “I think people maybe feel bad for me that I’m not winning everything and whatever. But I want people to be more concerned about other things going on in the world — people that are truly suffering.”
Some helpful perspective, right?
We all — all — need to find great joy, now, in being alive. To be an Olympic athlete? What a gift.
Here’s to Mikaela Shiffrin skiing with controlled exuberance, with great joy at being alive and, as, Bode Miller has declared unequivocally, and for goodness’ sake, he should know, the confidence of being the best.
One more thought, and not because Mikaela Shiffrin is American but because the Olympics are about excellence and you want to see the best deliver their best on game day: here’s to her getting in the start gate, letting the thought bubble turn to LFG and, when the beep goes off, just letting it rip. That’s gonna be more than plenty good enough.