After a middling performance in Tuesday’s downhill, Mikaela Shiffrin will have one more shot for an individual medal in Thursday’s combined event, one last chance to flip the script on what has been her most difficult Olympics.
Shiffrin, who failed to make it through the first few seconds of her first two races at these Games, quickly turned her attention to the combined event after completing a downhill race that in some ways was just more practice for what was to come, especially after an 18th place finish, 2.49 seconds behind gold medalist Corinne Sutter of Switzerland.
The combined event includes one run each of Shiffrin’s worst and best disciplines, downhill and then slalom. Of her 73 World Cup career victories, only two have been in the downhill, and she has not won a downhill since January of 2020. But when Shiffrin stays on her skis, no one can match her in slalom, and the trick will be to remain just close enough to the downhill specialists to catch them on the slalom course. She captured the silver medal in combined four years ago at the Pyeongchang Olympics.
“Nothing is guaranteed, and I think that is the number one lesson that people learn at the Olympic Games,” she said in a very thinly veiled reference to her falls in the slalom and giant slalom here. “Everyday I get on that track and I am able to do a solid run top to bottom, it gives me this chance to be a little more calm in my mind.”
The emotionally shaken Shiffrin from last week is mostly gone now, but she struggled to be as comfortable as she needed to be with the treacherous speed of the downhill at crucial moments Tuesday. She found herself fighting it, putting on the brakes with her skis and rising out of her tuck instead of riding the momentum down the mountain in the fashion of the best downhillers.
“I have a lot to learn in downhill, and I’m trying to take a crash course,” Shiffrin said. “I don’t expect much from results but I want to ski the hill the way that it is the most fun to ski, which is skiing with the hill and making speed, and you can feel the acceleration.”
Sutter continued the Swiss Alpine clinic at these Games. Her victory gave her country its fourth gold medal in eight events, and its seventh over all. Sutter’s time of one minutes, 31.87 seconds beat Sofia Goggia of Italy by .16 seconds. Nadia Delgado, another Italian, took the bronze.
Shiffrin had a clean, smooth run but not one with the kind of fearless, aggressive speed necessary to win one of the signature events of the Alpine meet in the Olympic Games.
This is not the way the Olympics was supposed to go for Shiffrin. She may still win a medal, perhaps even gold, and barring a sudden and unexpected change in plans she will be the rare skier to race in five individual races. She even plans to participate in a team event Saturday.
For Shiffrin though, these Games have already turned into a mostly forgettable experience that will require some soul searching to discover a silver lining. That will have to wait.
For now, there is another individual event that makes for a long and physically draining day . It requires a skier to bomb a downhill then reset mentally for the precision of a slalom run, while trying to put whatever happened in the downhill out of one’s mind and “start slalom like it’s a new day,” Shiffrin said.
“The events could not be more opposite,” she said, before heading off for lunch and some rest. “It’s like doing two different sports in one day.”
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