At this time a year ago, Mikaela Shiffrin said she was “tired of thinking about how tired” she would be at the end of a season that expanded her repertoire from slalom and giant slalom into super-G and downhill to make her a player for the overall season title. And when she got to Aspen for the World Cup finals in March, she was exhausted.
It showed. She failed to win either race, finishing second in slalom and sixth in giant slalom, and she felt bad for letting down her fans there. Now she calls the experience “a bitter end to quite an incredible season” that saw her become the fifth American to win the overall.
“Itap frustrating for me to ski when I’m tired, because I feel like no matter how hard I try, I’m just trying in the wrong way,” Shifrin said last week. “I’ve watched videos for my slalom and the GS and I can see clear as day what I could have done to be two-tenths faster and win the slalom. I could have been six-tenths faster just in the last third of the course alone. I have to remember how I felt in that moment, I couldn’t even feel my legs. I felt like I couldn’t stand, let alone finish the course.”
Shiffrin is typically the one finishing races the strongest. But with two dozen World Cup races, two more at the world championships and a trip to South Korea just before the end of the season to scope out the Olympic course in PyeongChang, her fatigue showed.
“I’m strong and I know that, but it was a long season,” Shiffrin said. “Marcel Hirscher (the men’s overall winner from Austria) said it is so hard to win the last two races of the season, especially when you’ve won so many and you’re going for the overall. There’s so many things on the line, to win the last two is just so hard.
“I’m thinking about that now. My coaches, my team, we’re all thinking about how to make sure I can keep my stamina going through the last races of the season, not only hopefully to have a great season and performances along the way – including the Olympics – but I can also finish strong and not just fizzle out.”
