When Mikaela Shiffrin last won an Olympic gold medal, in PyeongChang eight years ago, her father Jeff—known throughout the skiing community for both his unyielding fandom of his phenom daughter and his passion for ski-racing photography, as he shot everyone, not just Mikaela—put his hands on his hat in the South Korea cold. “Oh my God!” he yelled. As the last racer in this giant slalom competition, Italy’s Manuela Moelgg, moved down the mountain, it was becoming more and more apparent that Moegg wouldn’t catch Mikaela’s time, and that Jeff Shiffrin’s daughter was about to win her second career Olympic gold.
“This is a validation for all her effort,” said Jeff, whose always impressive mustache hosted a few icicles over the years as he cheered on his daughter. He was probably the happiest man on the planet at that moment.
Two years later, in 2020, Jeff Shiffrin died suddenly, in an accident in his Colorado home. He was 65. Jeff’s passing was not only a gut punch to his family—his wife Eileen, daughter Mikaela, and son Taylor—and to an elite ski circuit that admired him. It also hit home for anyone who admires a sports parent who could both nurture elite talent—Jeff put Mikaela on skis when she was 2—and, by all accounts, maintain a healthy and loving relationship with his prodigious child.
So it was only fitting that nearly a decade since that day in South Korea, Shiffrin movingly talked about her father on Wednesday, after she won the Olympic gold medal in the slalom race in Cortina d'Ampezzo. After dominating the skiing circuit for so long—Shiffrin owns an all-time record 108 World Cup wins—but failing to medal in her last eight Olympic races going back to PyeongChang, Shiffrin found herself under extreme pressure to deliver in the slalom, her best event. She did exactly that.
“This was a moment I have dreamed about,” she told the assembled media in Cortina. “I've also been very scared of this moment. Everything in life that you do after you lose someone you love is like a new experience. It's like being born again. I still have so many moments where I resist this. I don't want to be in life without my dad.” She fought back tears. “And maybe today was the first time that I could actually accept this reality,” she said. “Instead of thinking I would be going in this moment without him, to take the moment to be silent with him.”
Shiffrin revealed later in her press conference that she’s rarely been able to bond with her late father in such a meditative manner. “Part of my journey through grief has been challenging because I don't feel this thing that a lot of people talk about, this deep spiritual connection with their loved one,” said Shiffrin. “People talk about feeling the presence. And I haven't felt it in that way. I feel it in that I think about my dad all of the time. So I feel connected to him, in my thoughts and in talking about him. But, you know, sometimes I've also been resentful of the people who talk about feeling this person, like, ‘Oh, they're here with me. They're carrying me through this day.’ And I'm like, ‘Where?’ Like, ‘The f-ck.’” Shiffrin laughed. She apologized for cursing, though she didn’t need to. All too many people can relate.
“Why do you get to feel that?” she said. “Why can't it just be easier today?’”
In the wake of this enormous Olympic win, maybe grief can be a bit easier for Shiffrin. That’s an outcome the whole world can pull for.
Following the slalom victory but before her press conference, Shiffrin posted a dozen-paragraph message, about her mindset and approach to the race, to Instagram. Five of the paragraphs simply said, “I won.” In the penultimate one, she wrote. “I won. I f-cking won. This, right here, is the lottery and I won.” She ended it with “Oh, and I got a medal too.”
During Shiffrin’s press conference, I asked her remotely from Milan—sadly, Olympic logistics prevented me from being there in person—how writing that message before the race helped her.
(She confirmed she did not write it in the minutes after standing on the podium, as she was being shuttled from international TV interview to TV interview to more press interviews and then the press conference. She’s not the nimblest deadline writer of all time.)
Shiffrin said she actually wrote it three days ago. “I’ve been working a lot with my psychologist these days and with my whole team, it's been one, one big, happy family understanding psychology and understanding what's important to me. And I've been much more externally vocal to myself than usual,” says Shiffrin. “A little manifesting moment.”
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