YANQING, China — At this point,
Mikaela Shiffrin has
gotten used to a certain rhythm to her life. Every four years, the world
appears on her doorstep and asks how many medals she is going to win at the
Olympics.
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After all, she is, by many accounts, the best skier in the
world.
Yet for several years now, Shiffrin has been trying to explain
that
Alpine skiing, with its microscopic margins for error and its laundry list
of uncertainties, is not that predictable. A shift as subtle as a gust of wind,
or the movement of a cloud that allows sunlight to soften the snow in the
middle of a race, can make the difference between a gold medal and 11th place.
On Monday, the lesson was evident: She slid off course during
her first run in the giant slalom and is out of contention for a medal in that
event.
It proved again what even the world’s best skiers know: Years of
preparation and training can mean little at the
Olympics if conditions and
circumstances do not cooperate. It is a reality that this year has driven
Shiffrin to try not to overthink what she is about to confront on a mountain
she and almost everyone else will be racing on for the first time.
“When the wind is like this, we’re just going to have to know
that you could do everything right and get a gust of wind, and that’s that,”
Shiffrin said of the competition that will unfold on the blustery, unfamiliar
terrain of the Yanqing National Alpine Skiing Center.
Depending on her results, her energy level and the schedule, she
might compete in all five individual races at these Games, starting with the
giant slalom Monday. The idea that she might not win any of them, through no
fault of her own but because of bad luck, she admits, is “a little bit of a
bummer.”
It is one of the great frustrations of Alpine skiing. Nothing
solidifies an athlete’s status as one of the greats like an
Olympic medal. But
those medals can be won, or lost, in as little as two minutes.
“The globe winner is the best skier of the whole season,”
Vincent Kriechmayr of Austria said Friday, referring to the glass trophy awarded
to the World Cup champion each year. “But being an Olympic champion is one of
the most important goals you can reach in your career.”
As the wind blew snow across the finish area in Yanqing last
week, Kriechmayr spoke in a downcast tone, which made sense. He has a crystal
globe and four world championship medals — two of them gold — but he has yet to
win an Olympic medal.
As Shiffrin heads to the starting hut Monday to defend her gold
medal in the giant slalom, the argument for the sheer randomness of the
Olympic Alpine competition has most likely never been stronger. There are the usual
array of uncontrollable factors that nature can deliver at any ski race,
including bright sunshine and warming temperatures that can soften the snow and
make the course slower with each passing minute.
In Yanqing, an exposed, blustery and rocky peak, skiers have
been saying for days that the wind could be the leading differentiator between
the podium and also-rans, which means a life-changing medal could be determined
by the luck of the bib draw that assigns starting places. “A difference of half
a second,” Travis Ganong of the US said after his training run Friday.
There is also the cruel truth of the sport, in which there is
rarely time to recover from a slight slip or a momentary catching of a ski
edge. Shiffrin won her fifth crystal globe in slalom in 2018, but she finished
fourth in the Olympic slalom competition at the
Pyeongchang Games that year
because of a rough night of sleep before the race.
And then there is the newness of the slopes at Yanqing. Olympic
competitions often take place on mountains that are not part of the World Cup
circuit, but every skier at Yanqing is racing the courses for the first time
because the coronavirus pandemic prevented the traditional test events from
taking place in the year before the Games.
“We know the hill is steep and all the snow is man-made and
maybe going to be cold,” Paula Moltzan, a teammate of Shiffrin’s, said as she
prepared to travel to
China from
Europe. “But every microclimate has its own
type of snow.”
So far, the dry cold of Yanqing has kept the snow crisp, light
and hard, but the forecast is for warming temperatures throughout the week and
an unpredictable wind.
Shiffrin has been thinking for a while now that her ability to
quickly learn a new slope may be to her advantage: She is at her core a
specialist in slalom and giant slalom, disciplines that typically do not have
prerace training with gates set on the course. That often requires racers to
arrive in the morning, examine the piste and the gates and have at it. In
contrast, speed specialists usually excel by getting to know the same slopes
year after year, and learning the best paths through the twists and rolls of
the different tracks.
That does not lessen the pressure of the Olympics races, though.
Before Shiffrin’s first
Games in 2014, she said, she did not understand the
gravity of what winning an Olympic medal could mean. Then she won and got a big
taste of it, and it was on her mind — perhaps a bit too much — going into
Pyeongchang in 2018.
“Control what you can control,” Shiffrin said. “Just try not to
get too disappointed about the rest.”
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