- Mikaela Shiffrin won the Olympic slalom gold medal, finishing 1.50 seconds ahead of the silver medalist.
- The victory gives Shiffrin her third Olympic gold, tying her for the second-most by a U.S. Winter Olympian.
- Her four total Olympic medals tie her for the most by a U.S. woman in Alpine skiing.
CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Mikaela Shiffrin didn’t need this Olympic gold medal.
Her legacy was secured long ago, between her other two Olympic golds, her World Cup wins record and all the other superlatives she’s achieved. But that’s never been good enough for the peanut gallery, which tunes in every four years and doesn’t understand why Shiffrin can’t just conjure gold medals out of snow.
Ski racing is hard. Really, really hard. Get a couple of inches off your line and you’re toast. Or worse. Get a course or a hill that doesn’t suit your style and it’s just not going to be your day.
But the Winter Olympics is the only measuring stick for some folks and, in their minds, Shiffrin hasn’t measured up.
Maybe now they’ll finally get off her back.
“The irony is I’ve cared so much about wanting everybody to know the reality and to not want to answer those questions and to be so sick and tired of it. And I’ve felt that way since (being) fourth in South Korea in the slalom,” Shiffrin said.
“In order to do this today, I kind of needed to accept the possibility that those questions would keep coming,” she said. “It was like, just don’t resist it. Just live in my own moment.”
And that moment? My God, was it magnificent.
Shiffrin obliterated the field in winning the Olympic slalom on Wednesday, Feb. 18, finishing a whopping 1.50 seconds ahead. Silver medalist Camille Rast was closer to 12th-place finisher Laurence St-Germain than she was Shiffrin.
With three gold medals, Shiffrin is now tied with snowboarder Shaun White and bobsledder Kaillie Humphries for second-most by a U.S. Winter Olympian. (Speedskaters Bonnie Blair and Eric Heiden have five each.) Her four total medals tie her with Julia Mancuso for most medals in Alpine skiing by a U.S. woman. Only Norway’s Kjetil Andre Aamodt and Croatia’s Janica Kostelic have more gold medals, with four.
When Shiffrin crossed the finish line, she looked at the scoreboard for several long seconds — “I never seem to be able to read the scoreboard” — before reality hit. About what she’d done, what it took to get here, and all the people — here and beyond — who’ve played a part in it.
She cried as she hugged her mother Eileen, who is also one of her coaches. She paused to gather herself and then kissed her hand and touched the snow, a tribute to her late father, before climbing onto the medals podium.
“These moments, we do build them up for sure. I think everybody builds it up and I’m building it up for myself, too,” she said. “Like I said, the biggest task today was to simplify and focus on the skiing.”
Shiffrin’s career, at the Olympics and everywhere else, is the kind of dominance that inspires people to hang banners, build statues and name their children and pets after. Yet rather than appreciating what she’s done, she’s always been held to an impossible standard.
You won a gold medal in the giant slalom at the Pyeongchang Games? Great, but what about that fourth-place finish in the slalom? The Beijing Olympics were Bizarro World because of the COVID restrictions and it was the first Games since the unexpected death of your dad, who was so central to you as both a person and a ski racer, but what’s wrong with you that you couldn’t win a single medal?
And when Shiffrin struggled in the slalom portion of the team combined, her 15th-place finish dropping her and Breezy Johnson from first to fourth, it was here we go again.
“I knew after the team combined that there would be some stories out there that would be really frustrating to look at,” Shiffrin said.
The truth is, Shiffrin never had an “Olympic problem.” She had ski races that didn’t go her way. Which is no different than what happens every season.
No different than the Olympic experience of pretty much every other skiing great, by the way. Marcel Hirscher, whose eight overall World Cup titles are the most of any skier? Has three Olympic medals, two of them gold. Same for Ingemar Stenmark, whose World Cup wins record Shiffrin broke.
“The reality of our sport is you lose a lot more than you win,” Shiffrin said. “When you look back on my career, I know statistics and everything, but still I’ve definitely lost a lot more than I’ve won. So that’s the one thing that’s certain is that you’re not going to win everything.”
But most people don’t see, or care, about that. So Shiffrin’s “reality” blew up into something it wasn’t.
“This whole season, every single slalom race, I’m like, ‘Oh God, I am really just digging myself into a hole here,’” Shiffrin said of her success this year in the World Cup, where she’s won seven of the eight slalom races and finished second in the other.
“The one thing that’s certain is that that wave’s going to stop,” she added. “You don’t get to ride that wave forever.”
Shiffrin has ridden it longer, and better, than most, however.
It’s about time she gets the recognition, and appreciation she deserves. She’s more than earned it.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.