On Wednesday, at the Olympic Winter Games in Beijing, Mikaela Shiffrin, the most accomplished Alpine ski racer of her (and probably, soon, every) generation, skied out of the slalom, just five turns into her first run. This was shocking, not just because Shiffrin had been favored to place at least second, if not first, or because she hardly ever falls or fails to finish, or because, two days earlier, she’d basically done the same thing in the giant slalom, or because the media, most of all NBC, the network broadcasting the Games in the U.S., had (understandably, considering her standing in the sport, her being American, her epochal talent, and her disarming charm) made Shiffrin one of the tentpoles of its coverage.
The episode was shocking, too, because it seemed to wreck her to the core. Here was an athlete known for her competitive aplomb and public grace, one who’d endured a good share of setbacks—including the tragedy, two years ago, of her father’s untimely death, at sixty-five—and yet had almost always managed to rediscover her form and pile up the results. She’d achieved this, too, while talking openly through the years about her states of mind, with sensitivity and candor of a kind that one doesn’t often encounter in the blah-blah-blah—you-got-what-you-need? world of professional sports. She has always come off as both vulnerable and invincible, a mere mortal who skis like a god.
So to see her screw up on this stage—and, let’s be honest, her mistake in the slalom was an unforced error, an unprecedented glimpse of the profane—and then appear to go to pieces, on live television, was bewildering, and, for her fans, deeply upsetting.
After her momentum forced her to bail on the sixth gate in the slalom, she shouted at herself, then slid off to the side, removed her skis, and sat stunned in the snow. She stayed there for twenty minutes. After a while, a coach came to console her. NBC’s cameras stayed on Shiffrin, ignoring the next several racers on the course. (You could tell that the competitors kept coming because, even in her apparent state of incomprehension and self-pity, she watched them go, her head turning as they skied past. Perhaps the slalom nerd in her, or even the den sister, couldn’t help but assess their turns.) It was amazing, and maybe insulting to the rest of the field, and maddening to ski-racing geeks like me, that NBC ignored the actual race in favor of her sit-in. But it wasn’t exactly surprising, either. Her flameout was the big story. And, as we know after decades of Up-Close-and-Personal™ coverage, it’s the story, not the sport, that drives network coverage of the Games. And, of course, here I am, too, writing about Shiffrin’s travails, and not the come-from-behind victory in the second run of the slalom by her chief rival, Petra Vlhová.
For many observers, to judge from my in-box and Twitter, it was unconscionably invasive of NBC to train its cameras on her—to hold her private moment of self-incrimination and shame up to public scrutiny. People cited the examples of Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka, two beloved world-bests who not long ago pulled out of the highest levels of competition because the pressure, external and internal, had critically inhibited their ability not only to perform but to get through the day. At risk of inviting a stoning, I’ll say that this comparison seems premature and facile in Shiffrin’s case, an instance of armchair psychologizing—pin the trauma on the champion. We don’t know what Shiffrin was feeling. Neither did she, apparently—not yet. She presumably knew she had choked, or maybe just goofed, but she wasn’t sure how or why, or what that meant for her racing form, or her confidence level going forward. We could see that she was baffled and sad. The snow in Beijing is weird—all artificial. The course set was tight; maybe her tactics were bad. She’d committed to an aggressive line (this was her own halting explanation, by the way), and it didn’t work out, as it may have in the past. In fact, it quickly made her look uncommonly clumsy. For flatlanders back home to blame a couple missed turns and a few seconds of brain lock on the deep wounds of grief, or the fear of failure, seems reckless, and perhaps even condescending.
The mistakes were so uncharacteristic that, we tell ourselves, the cause must be mental. And, if it’s mental, it must be trauma. But, unlike Biles or Osaka, Shiffrin hasn’t said as much, and maybe we shouldn’t presume that she will. The Norwegian skier Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, who had won a bronze medal the day before in the super G and who, as the broadcast never stops reminding us, is Shiffrin’s boyfriend, posted a picture of her sitting in the snow, before the coach had got to her, and wrote, “Most of you probably look at it saying: ‘she has lost it’, ‘she can’t handle the pressure’ or ‘what happened?’… Which makes me frustrated, because all I see is a top athlete doing what a top athlete does! It’s a part of the game and it happens.” (Shiffrin herself tweeted out his post and wrote, “My hope for every human is that they find another human who finds a way to love, understand, and heal them in the way @AleksanderKilde has done and continues to [do] for me.” So, among other things, maybe we can assume that she agrees with his interpretation of the sit-in.)
Also, to be fair to the NBC production team, Shiffrin had sat down practically on the racecourse—just off the field of play, really. If a baseball pitcher, after a rough inning, chose not to return to the dugout but instead to lie down along the third-base line, you’d expect the cameras to notice, and the commentators to be bemused. And who can forget the hoary line from the old ABC “Wide World of Sports” intro, “The thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat”? Here, for your delectation, between ads for Verizon and Walmart, was agony of a fresh kind. (Shiffrin, for her part, tweeted the other day, after her teammate Nina O’Brien had a horrific crash in the giant slalom: “This sport is SO damn hard. It’s brutal, and it hurts- far more often than it ever feels good.”)
At the outset of the Winter Games, the Times ran a great feature on the competing athletes’ fears. News flash: they’re almost all terrified. Who wouldn’t be? Skiers, snowboarders, skaters, lugers; it’s nuts what they do. Start with snow and ice and steel and the possibility of calamitous injury, then add competitive and commercial pressure, and even a casual viewer would want to throw up. The trick, for the athletes, is learning how to deal with it. And the thrill, for those of us who enjoy watching them, is to see them pull it off, or not.
Before Shiffrin’s run on Wednesday, the cameras showed her in the starting area, staring straight ahead, drained of all affect. She looked either totally dialled in or else almost sick with nerves, but, of course, she always looks like this before a race. That’s her game face. Still, I had a bad feeling. I felt queasy, and I was just sitting on a couch, eating a cookie. The broadcast cut to her brother and some family in the States, and it seemed to me they were feeling the same way. I got to spend a few days with her before the last Olympics, for a Profile, and know firsthand that she speaks openly about nerves, which I suspect is one of her ways of dealing with them. More than a decade of evidence shows that she clearly knows, or at least has known, how to contend with the pressure, as much as it may tear her up inside to do so.
Later, after the slalom debacle, she showed up to cheer on her teammates in the second run and to watch her rival win gold. (NBC seems not to much love Vlhová, who, if Shiffrin is our Federer, has emerged as her Djokovic.) Shiffrin told reporters at the mountain, “It’s not the end of the world. And it’s so stupid to care this much. But I feel . . . I feel that I have to question a lot now.” She also said that she wished she could call her father. “He would probably tell me to get over it.”
She has a chance to do so on Thursday evening (Friday in Beijing) in the super G, if she decides to go ahead and race, as planned. She’s not favored to win that one, but the perverse logic of her week suggests that, because of that, she has a puncher’s chance. The Games, for the women Alpine skiers, end next week with a combined event—a downhill run and a slalom run—in which she is the strong favorite. It will be hard for a human not to watch and root her on.
