When I’m left sifting through the rubble, trying to find a glimmer of hope in the calamity that has befallen me, I try to recall the counsel my father never tyres of giving me: “You can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it.”
It’s infuriating in its simplicity because we constantly replay our failures in our heads – if only I had done this, spoken that, or thought to plan for X, this would never have occurred. But, oh my god, holy sh*t, it occurred… again.
Mikaela Shiffrin failed to complete her third event, sliding out on the 10th gate of the Alpine combined competition. She finished sixth after the downhill and was on track for her maiden podium finish of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Something about this course simply didn’t fit with the favorite, who didn’t medal in any of the disciplines she was meant to win in what was intended to be a record-breaking Olympics for the 26-year-old from Edwards, Colorado. She has one last event, the mixed team parallel slalom, and she’ll need a lot of support from her team to win and help her set the record for most career Olympic gold medals earned by a US alpinist. If they fall short on Friday, she’ll have to wait four years for another chance.
It will be difficult, if not impossible, for Shiffrin to recover from what occurred in 2022, and she revealed in an interview with NBC that she was still shaken by the slalom course before it snatched her ski one more time. “I’m not completely secure with the slalom,” she said. “I mean, I keep picturing myself skiing out on the sixth gate, so I’m just going to try my best.”
There’s no denying that Shiffrin’s Olympics have gone horribly wrong. And now she’s at the point where the only thing left to do is find out the best way – for her — to respond.