Shiffrin and her boyfriend (and fellow World Cup racer) Aleksander Kilde slow things down in Portillo, Chile. The big 8-7. Shiffrin broke Ingemar Stenmark’s record for most overall World Cup wins in March of 2023, celebrating with her brother, Taylor, and his wife, Kristi (pictured here). With 88 career World Cup wins, five World Cup overall titles and three Olympic medals to her name, Shiffrin is going to need a big-ger trophy case. During the pandemic, she got together (from a distance, at first) with Norwegian ski racer Aleksander Kilde, a two-time Olympic medalist. He’d reached out to offer his condolences on her father’s passing, and the conversation between the two of them grew. “I’ll always be the plus one when I’m around Mikaela,” Kilde has said. In other words: He’s a decorated athlete in his own right, but understands he’ll always be second to his more famous girlfriend. It would be nine months after her dad’s death before Shif-frin was back in a starting gate on the World Cup, but things felt off. Favored to win multiple medals at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, Shiffrin was the poster girl for NBC. All eyes—fa-miliar with the sport or not—were on her. That week, she fell in three races and didn’t win a single medal. “Anybody, no matter how good they are, can have a bad week,” says Paul Kristofic, her coach. “But it was heartbreaking to see that happen to someone who wholeheartedly deserved a better series than that.” Even when the stakes were as high as they were in Beijing and when the media was calling her Olympic performance a “disappointment,” she remained steadfast. On TV, she sat for what felt like an eternity on the sidelines of a course she’d crashed out of in Beijing. “I can’t only care about winning,” she said. “If that was the case, I wouldn’t be doing this. I have to care about all of it.” After that Olympics, Shiffrin went on to win the overall World Cup title in 2022. By the time 2023 arrived, she was on fire again, refocused with her eyes on the record books. THE EMAIL SHOWED UP on a Saturday afternoon in June. It was from Shiffrin’s publicist, Harrod. “In case you’re still interested, Mikaela could give you 15 minutes tomorrow around 3:45 p.m. if that works? That might be our only opportunity,” she wrote. The next day, nearing the end of the weekend, I mind-lessly opened my email on my phone and nearly had a panic attack, realizing that just a few minutes before call time, I hadn’t responded. I scratched out a speedy email to Harrod and suddenly, Shiffrin and I were in a Zoom room together. (Harrod was there, too, but with her camera off.) I hastily worked up a list of questions as the meeting fired up, my kids still making noise in the background. Shiffrin, on the other hand, popped in with hair and makeup ex-quisitely done, a clean white backdrop of a well-decorated home behind her. Harrod had asked me to stay within the 15-minute mark, even though Shiffrin can sometimes be a little long-winded. I was jittery, but Shiffrin was too warm and friendly for me to stay shaky for long. It was early sum-mer, and she’d just returned from a two-week trip to Maui with her family and Kilde. She and her boyfriend were still doing double sessions in the gym each day, but they had some time left for windsurfing. “It’s not free time necessarily. I’m careful with that word because people tend to assume ‘Oh, you’re free, like, you’re not doing anything,’” she said. “But I have not had that really, ever. For the last 12 years, I don’t think there’s been a minute where I didn’t feel like a chicken with my head cut off.” Fatigue is real at this point in her year. After her World Cup season ended last spring, she went straight to New York for a weeklong media frenzy, then she took a rare week off in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, with family and friends. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be great, some beach time. Wonderful.’ Then I got really sick the entire time,” she said with a chuckle. Mikaela Shiffrin 051
The Ski Journal Volume 17, Issue 3: Page 51
