It was a heartbreaking end, Mikaela Shiffrin’s second early exit from an Olympic race in three days. But Shiffrin was not ready to move on. Not just yet.
Frustrated and bewildered by a Beijing Olympics dream going wrong in real time, Shiffrin sat down in the snow next to the slalom course on Wednesday morning and buried her head between her bent knees. She remained there for more than 20 minutes as some of her rivals whizzed past, lost in her thoughts and her disappointment and trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
When she finally came down the hill, Shiffrin didn’t have answers.
“I had the intention to do my best skiing and my quickest turns,” Shiffrin told reporters, fighting back tears. “But in order to do that, I had to push the line, the tactics. And it is really on the limit then. And things happen so fast that there was really not space to slip up, even a little bit.”
Nothing in Shiffrin’s professional career portended the series of quick, complete disappointments she is enduring this week on her sport’s biggest stage. Slalom is ski racing’s most dauntingly precise discipline, but for Shiffrin, a two-time Olympic champion and the most decorated slalom skier in history, to last only five seconds in her best event was almost unfathomable.
As Shiffrin wiped away tears on live television, friends and strangers rallied to her side. Her boyfriend, the Norwegian skiing star Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, posted a supportive message on Instagram alongside an image of Shiffrin sitting alone in the snow.
“When you look at this picture you can make up so many statements, meanings and thoughts,” he wrote. “Most of you probably look at it saying: ‘she has lost it,’ ‘she can’t…