US star and two-time Olympic gold medallist Mikaela Shiffrin took to Instagram to reveal the social media abuse she has received in the aftermath of a disappointing Winter Olympics campaign.
A United States team led by Shiffrin is leaving Beijing with just one of the 30 individual medals in Alpine skiing – and it’s a silver (from Ryan Cochran-Siegle in the men’s super-G).
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There is one last chance for a medal in the team parallel race, an event added to the Olympics in 2018. Shiffrin is part of the US roster for that, along with Paula Moltzan, AJ Hurt, River Radamus, Tommy Ford and Luke Winters.
A medal favourite heading into the Games, the star alpine skier was left reading through several insults directed at her following her unlucky results in the slalom and giant slalom events.
The insults “disgrace”, “arrogant”, “got what you deserved” and “dumb blonde” were just some of the many insults she received.
So what went wrong for the US this time? A lot, it turns out.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CaFGSKSF501/
Shiffrin, already one of the most accomplished skiers in history at age 26, with three medals from past Olympics — two golds, one silver — along with six world championship golds, three overall World Cup titles, 73 World Cup race wins (third-most ever) and 47 World Cup slalom victories (a record for any discipline).
She entered all five women’s races in China and this is how they went, in order: giant slalom, Did Not Finish; slalom, Did Not Finish; super-G, ninth; downhill, 18th; combined, Did Not Finish.
“I don’t really understand it, and I’m not sure when I’m going to have much of an explanation,” Shiffrin said yesterday when she tumbled about 10 seconds into the slalom portion of the combined after being fifth in the downhill.
“And I can’t explain to you how frustrated I am to not know what I can learn from the day.”
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