Eight years is a long time to carry the weight of expectation.
Eight years since Pyeongchang in 2018, where a 22-year-old Mikaela Shiffrin walked away with slalom gold and the world at her feet. In the years that followed, she rewrote the record books on the World Cup circuit — becoming the most decorated alpine ski racer in the history of the sport, male or female. She chased records. She broke them. She kept going.
But the Olympics — the one stage where the entire world is watching, where legends are made in memory rather than just in statistics — had not given her that gold again. Until now.
Mikaela Shiffrin won the slalom gold medal at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, ending that eight-year drought in the most Shiffrin way possible: with technical brilliance, with composure under pressure, and with the quiet ferocity of someone who has been waiting a very long time for this moment.
I have been in sports media for 20 years. I have watched great athletes chase the moment that defines them in the public imagination — and I have watched the same athletes fall short of it on the biggest stages. The World Cup numbers tell you who Shiffrin is every week of the winter. The Olympics tells the rest of the world. Today, the rest of the world got the full picture.
The context matters here. The years since Pyeongchang were not easy. Shiffrin suffered through the sudden death of her father, Jeff Shiffrin, in February 2020 — a loss that took her off the circuit for months and, by her own account, changed her relationship with the sport. She dealt with injuries that would have ended careers with less foundation. She went to the Beijing Games in 2022 and left without a medal — a story that dominated coverage and that some corners of sports media turned into a narrative of failure for a woman who had done nothing but succeed for a decade.
She kept going. Down to Italy, to these slopes, where at the age of 30 she put together two runs that were a masterclass in alpine skiing and reminded the world why she is the standard by which all others in her sport are measured.
This gold is different from 2018. The 2018 gold was earned by a dominant young champion. This gold was earned by a woman who had every reason to stop and chose not to.
That is what sports is all about, folks.
