Mikaela Shiffrin Redefines Olympic Legacy With Slalom Gold

Mikaela Shiffrin can now leave her Olympics demons behind.

For in her final Olympic race of these 2026 Milano Cortina Games, the one that carried extraordinary pressure for Shiffrin given that it’s her best discipline, and she hadn’t won an Olympic medal in eight races going back eight years, Shiffrin brought her game to Cortina d’Ampezzo on Wednesday, winning the slalom by a margin of 1.50 seconds, the largest margin in any alpine skiing event since 1998.

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In Shiffrin’s first run, despite a near-slip in one of her turns, she took a .82 second lead over Germany’s Lena Duerr, giving her the largest first-run advantage in an Olympic slalom since 1960, according to NBC’s Nick Zaccardi. In her second run, the two skiers who went off right before Shiffrin both failed to finish.

Those mishaps could have raised anyone’s anxiety. Shiffrin’s lead seemed so big, that only a similar slip-up could cost her gold. She blocked all that out, skied exquisitely, and crossed the line in a combined 1 min., 39.10 sec.

On Feb. 10 in Cortina, Shiffrin finished 15th in the slalom portion of the alpine team combined event, costing herself and downhill partner Breezy Johnson a medal. The winner of 71 World Cup slalom races, and an Olympic gold medal in the event in 2014 in Sochi, Shiffrin hadn’t finished that low in a slalom field since 2012. Given her status as the world’s winningest skier (she’s finished first in a record 108 World Cup races in all) and her slalom dominance on the World Cup circuit this season (she’s won 7 of 8 races) Shiffrin’s underperformance was stunning.

And it called into question whether Olympic pressure was getting to her. Just like it has for another Olympian seen by many as a golden shoo-in: men’s figure skater Ilia Malinin. In a mid-December interview with TIME, Shiffrin did let on that she was “a little bit of a ball of stress most days.”

Shiffrin and her team pushed back against the negative chatter.

Taking to Instagram, Shiffrin wrote before her Sunday giant slalom event: “The Olympics shine a bright light on medals … and within this experience, what I treasure most are the quiet, meaningful moments of work, connection, and shared joy with my team. I am here for the skiing and the execution of my turns.”

She signed off her message with: “I’m grateful to be here, motivated and excited for what’s next, and proud to be part of this American team. May we all champion one another, tread lightly on what we don’t fully comprehend, and have the fortitude to keep showing up.”

There are a few ways to interpret Shiffrin’s comments. Much-needed perspective on the Olympics from someone who’s been in the cauldron? An athlete’s method of controlling her own narrative, and reducing the level of pressure and expectation on her upcoming Olympic races?

It’s always worth remembering: two things can be true at once.

In a Facebook post, Shiffrin’s publicist, Megan Harrod, cited the vile comments Shiffrin had received on social media, after she quoted Nelson Mandela in a press conference; she had been asked a question about representing Team USA in time of tension back home.

Harrod said she was “sick to [her] stomach” after reading headlines about Shiffrin’s combined effort. “One race is not a representation of an athlete’s entire journey. Seven races aren’t either. There’s so much more, and the athletes deserve for their stories to be told more holistically and less lazily,” Harrod wrote. In another post, she cited a USA Today column in which Nancy Armour wrote “we expect these athletes to deliver like show ponies during the Olympics—ignoring they’ve got an entire body of work outside the Games—and are ruthless when they don’t.” Of Armour, Harrod said “there are still good ones after all,” implying there are plenty of bad ones in sports media.

Harrod also wrote: “The Olympics are 16 days out of a career. To deem someone a failure or a choke job is to ignore all the wins it took just to get here. Just because you weren’t paying attention to those, does not make them mean any less.”

Choke. There’s the operative word. Not that long ago, headline writers and commenters threw that world around with impunity. But as athletes have grown more comfortable publicly revealing their mental health battles, most good-faith actors have grown more careful labeling failure in such impolite fashion.

Sian Beilock, a cognitive scientist who is now the president of Dartmouth University, literally wrote a book on the subject. Choke: What The Secrets Of The Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To was published in 2010, but would Beilock use the same title 16 years later? She would. “Look, I think that choking is a thing, just as it was when I wrote the book before,” Beilock tells TIME in a phone conversation before Shiffrin’s slalom on Wednesday. “It’s still a thing now. It’s performing worse than expected given your skill level when there’s a lot of pressure, and it’s no secret the Olympics have a lot of pressure.”

Dartmouth gave Shiffrin an honorary degree last June. Her father Jeff, who died in an accident in his Colorado home in 2020, is a Dartmouth alum and skied for the school. Beilock does not see the messages from Shiffrin and team as a call to treat Shiffrin with kids’ gloves. “They’re making it clear that there’s more than just the Olympics in terms of her success,” says Beilock. “I think that’s good.” Beilock counts herself as a Shiffrin fan, and is confident that her legacy will be defined by much more than the Olympics.

Plus, three Olympic gold medals in her singular career—slalom in 2014, giant slalom in 2018, and now this slalom prize in 2026—is outstanding. Olympic historian Bill Mallon points out that Shiffrin’s 12-year gap between Olympic slalom golds is the largest between individual gold medals in the same event at the Winter Games. Shiffrin’s giant slalom race on Sunday, in which she finished 11th, seemed to give her a confidence lift. Shiffrin crashed in a giant slalom in November of 2024, causing her to miss a chunk of that World Cup season. She wondered if she’d ever start a giant slalom again.

While she reached a World Cup podium in the discipline in late January, finishing third at a race in Czechia, and was considered a medal contender in Cortina, Shiffrin took her results in stride. “I was trying to turn any nervous energy into more sort of intensity,” said Shiffrin after that race. “Taking the power from the course.” The plan was to channel that positive energy into the slalom—something she failed to do in the team combined. “I will try to handle it differently in my head,” said Shiffrin.

She did just that on Wednesday. In the lead-up to these Olympics, and during the events, Shiffrin has talked about trying to build a bigger skiing tent. She wants to attract more eyeballs to the week-to-week machinations of skiing, outside of the two-week, quadrennial Olympic window. “My biggest dream would be to help more people understand the sport of ski racing,” said Shiffrin.

That might be a tough sell. Many people, especially Olympic fans, are locked into their sports consumption habits. They tune into skiing, curling, and figure skating every four years. In a universe of endless entertainment options, the mountains—beautiful as they are, as fast as these athletes rocket down them—face tough competition. So Shiffrin’s biggest dream may never come true. 

But after nearly a decade, she’s got Olympic gold again. No more choke talk.