I wonder if she'd consider being a sports analyst for the Spritzler Report...that is after her eventual retirement.
‘I’ve Been Impaled’ to a Historic 100th Victory: Why Mikaela Shiffrin Remains a Great American Champion
The 29-year-old alpine skier has made a convincing case as the best ever. But her superpower may be her relentless honesty.
By Jason Gay, WSJ
Feb. 24, 2025 7:00 am ET
Mikaela Shiffrin celebrates after her 100th World Cup victory.
She chases no one anymore. She carves her own line, and she has for a good, long while.
On Sunday in Sestriere, Italy, the U.S. alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin claimed a historic World Cup victory—the 100th in her extraordinary, unprecedented career. A couple of years back, Shiffin toppled Ingemar Stenmark’s alpine record of 86 World Cup wins, and the 29-year-old has added plenty of distance since.
One hundred wins is an outrageous mark, once thought unreachable. Shiffrin claimed she hadn’t mulled the possibility until she arrived at its doorstep.
“Too big,” she told Eurosport at the finish line Sunday. “It’s too long. It takes too much.”
By now Shiffrin knew: nothing about this was easy. Shiffrin’s ski career may at first have seemed impossibly charmed—a Colorado comet, sharpened on Vermont ice, breaking through as an Olympic gold medalist at 18—but her evolution into skiing legend has proven to be arduous, even brutal.
Getting No. 100 had been an especially wicked challenge. Shiffrin entered this season poised to conquer, but in November she suffered a freak puncture wound to her right oblique region during a crash in giant slalom. (“I’ve been impaled,” Shiffrin deadpanned later, channeling Olaf the Snowman from the movie “Frozen.”)
She left the course on a stretcher. Surgery and recovery cost Shiffrin time and confidence. She returned to racing in January, but rewiring the mentality to ski to win—that edgy dance between risk and recklessness—was a fickle process.
Shiffrin said Sunday that she’d wondered “many times whether it is the right time to come back.” Earlier this month, she confessed to “PTSD-esque” symptoms in opting out of defending her gold medal in giant slalom at the World Championships.
She described her 61 hundredths of a second slalom victory in the Italian Alps (where 21-year-old Croatian phenom Zrinka Ljutic finished second and Shiffrin’s U.S. teammate Paula Moltzan took third) as “an amazing day in the middle of some really tough months.”
Has there ever been a champion who’s offered a more candid real-time assessment of a career? All the records and trophies make Shiffrin look supernaturally skilled, but she counters that with a relentless honesty about her vulnerabilities and doubts.
To follow Shiffrin is to grow familiar not just with her triumphs, but also her low moments, and her restless inner dialogue of worries and nerves as she tries to build herself back up.
Shiffrin has never shied away from confronting her setbacks—most notably her torment at the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, where merely finishing became a cruel international drama—with a truthfulness elite athletes rarely offer.
It’s made Shiffrin a leader amid a transformational sports moment: The widening realization that athletic lives are both a physical and mental test, and the mental aspect has been shortchanged far too long.
In a marketplace that still sells athletes as vanguards, Shiffrin’s never seemed interested in burnishing the idea of perfection. Professional agonies; personal trauma like the 2020 loss of her father, Jeff: for all her talent, Shiffrin’s most influential superpower may be her willingness to discuss things most of us don’t like discussing.
Grief, Shiffrin wrote in 2022, is “not linear. It’s not a climb up a mountain. It’s more like a maze.”
Athletic careers often travel a similar, erratic path. Shiffrin has made a staggering case as the greatest alpine skier to ever do it—“She’s much better than I was…I could never have been so good in all disciplines,” Stenmark said as she closed in on his record—but her legacy includes letting the world in her struggles, too.
It’s why No. 100 meant something more than 100. It’s why nobody was surprised to see Shiffrin’s tears flowing atop the podium. It’s why people chuckled when Shiffrin confessed she couldn’t figure out if she’d won, because she couldn’t locate the digital clock at the finish.
“A hundred times later, and I still can’t find the darn scoreboard,” she said.
She is a champion who tells it like it is, good, bad, and human, which is why so many people care. Mikaela Shiffrin chases no one anymore, but she’s not alone.
Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com
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