Cortina d’Ampezzo (Italy) (AFP) – Mikaela Shiffrin said Saturday she has learned from the mistakes which cost her Olympic medals four years ago as the in-form ski star prepares for her first race at the Milan-Cortina Games. American Shiffrin comes into the Winter Olympics off the back of an incredible season in which she has already won the World Cup slalom title for a record-breaking ninth time and is on course to claim the overall crystal globe. But she arrives in Cortina d’Ampezzo with tough memories of her disastrous last Olympics in Beijing where the most successful skier of all time failed to claim a single medal.
“Skiing is hard because when you’ve done something technically, like you’ve made a technical error maybe you know what you need to do to fix it and you know the steps you need to take in order to get there,” Shiffrin told reporters. “But it’s still so precise and there’s so many variables. It’s definitely hard to do that and like do it right all the time. In Beijing, all these kind of pieces that came together and all the different factors that played a role, we’ve assessed them all and I continue to assess them, including my own role to play.”
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Shiffrin won slalom gold in Sochi 2014 and the giant slalom title in Pyeongchang 2018 where she also claimed silver in the combined event. But she failed to finish three of the six races at the 2022 Games, and she blamed both her failures in China and her horror crash in Killington, Vermont in 2024 on the same technical error. “I would like be more committed to my outside ski…the outside ski is the boss. Like if you’re on your outside ski, you’re in the driver’s seat. That has been an ongoing task for me because it’s also one of the things that played a role in my crash in Killington and I will tell you, I would take Beijing any day over crashing in Killington and getting a puncture wound to the abdomen.”
“How it’s made me better is you learn from mistakes and you just try to be cleaner and more precise.” Shiffrin is set to make her Cortina bow in the team combined on Tuesday, and will follow that up with giant slalom on February 15 and the slalom — her specialist event — three days later.
In the meantime, Shiffrin will watch her teammate Lindsey Vonn try to defy a ruptured knee ligament and claim a fourth Olympic gold in Sunday’s downhill. “I’m so excited to watch. I think we all are,” said Shiffrin. “Her tenacity and grit and what she’s showing with this Olympics and staying true to her own values, that’s just, that’s straight up beautiful. I trained today and I actually have a recovery day tomorrow, so like I will be cheering and ripping it to the TV. I have like 100 percent belief that anything is possible.”
© 2024 AFP
