The Secret Behind the Most Thrilling Victory of the Winter Games

This is part of Slate’s 2026 Olympics coverage. Read more here. 

After Mikaela Shiffrin crossed the finish line in the 2026 Olympic slalom, she appeared lost in a trance. No fist pump. No falling to the snow in relief. No tears of joy. Not even a smile. Just a blank stare. Then she crouched down, head between her knees and arms wrapped around her legs.

Did she know what she had just done? Could she not see the scoreboard?

Over the past 15 years, ski-racing fans have become accustomed to Shiffrin’s finish-line stares. An introvert who skis fast and thinks deeply, she needs a little time to herself after high-pressure races—a second to absorb the run she has just completed. For Shiffrin, who skis slalom with an engineer’s precision, it’s all about the turns. And on Wednesday in Cortina, the greatest skier of all time had just made 63 perfect, carved turns on her second run—plus another 63 damn fine ones in her first run.

“That’s what I came here to do, to show up with that skiing,” she said after gathering herself. “I can’t even explain what it feels like to cross the finish line and know before I saw the time that I did that skiing, and then to see the time and think, ‘Holy shit.’ ”

Before she arrived at that holy shit moment, Shiffrin had more than a few demons to quiet. She was a face of these Games, but four days into them, her Olympics curse had only deepened. Shiffrin had not won a medal at the Winter Games in eight years, despite trying six times in Beijing in 2022. Then there was all the other baggage: the bad crash in giant slalom 14 months ago that left her with PTSD, plus years of other battle scars. How could anyone win a medal with all this weighing them down?

It fell to Team Shiffrin to lift the load, listen to her concerns, and quiet the noise. And while records, medals, and trophies typically don’t matter to Shiffrin, this time, she confessed, they did.

Shiffrin’s Olympics mission began 10 days ago when she arrived in Cortina. At the time, Lindsey Vonn’s quest to win a fourth Olympic medal without an ACL in her left knee was consuming all the bandwidth. Then came Vonn’s horrible, leg-shattering crash in the downhill, which fed another news cycle with concerns for her health and debates over whether she should’ve been competing in the first place. Meanwhile, Shiffrin was quietly training for the team combined slalom, held last Tuesday. Breezy Johnson had just won the Olympic downhill title. Team Johnson/Shiffrin was as sure a bet as bets get to win the team combined. It was like betting that the sun will come up tomorrow.

But then Shiffrin started skiing, and she didn’t look like herself. She looked—gasp!—human, as hard on her edges as everyone else who competes in the slalom. Typically, her delicate touch around the gates makes it appear as if she has a different relationship with gravity. In the team combined, she looked as if she had fallen to earth. Johnson/Shiffrin finished just off the podium in fourth, while another U.S. team, Jackie Wiles and Paula Moltzan, claimed bronze.

“I didn’t quite find a comfort level that allows me to produce full speed,” Shiffrin told reporters after the race. “I’m going to have to learn what to do, what to adjust in the short time we have before the other tech races.”

Commentators said the course was too flat for Shiffrin, the snow too soft. And Shiffrin agreed. World Cup courses are usually Zamboni-firm. In Cortina, the conditions were softer, and Shiffrin confessed, “I didn’t adjust to it.” But the Olympics weren’t over. “We always do better with more information,” Shiffrin said, ever the scientist gathering data, “and I got a lot of information today.”

For all Shiffrin learned in the team combined, her fourth-place finish also added more weight to her shoulders. Then the giant slalom didn’t go her way either, though in truth she was always an outside shot to medal in that race. Since her GS crash, Shiffrin has worked with her team on communication, being clearer about what she wants and needs. At this Olympics, she told them that she wanted to win the slalom gold. She had last won it a dozen years ago.

As Shiffrin worked to master the Olympia delle Tofane slalom course, her closest confidants—her mom, her coach, her physiotherapist and sports psychologist, her friends and family—reminded her to keep it simple. She’d come to the Olympics to focus on all the turns between the start and the finish. Everything else was just noise.

On Wednesday, Shiffrin did exactly that. For 63 turns in her first run and another 63 in her second, she re-found her mojo, and the moment almost overwhelmed her.

She explained later that as she stared at the scoreboard, she first wanted to make sure she saw the green light of a winning run—she did not want to embarrass herself by celebrating too early. Gratitude then came over her like a wave, and she thought of her father Jeff Shiffrin, who died in a tragic accident six years ago this month. He had been with her for all of her previous Olympic medal wins—for her first gold in Sochi in 2014, and her gold and silver medals four years later in Pyeongchang. She did not know what it would be like to win an Olympic medal without him, if she even wanted to win one without him there.

In the finish corral, before acknowledging the crowd, Shiffrin took a silent moment to communicate in her “heart and mind” with her dad and thank everyone on her team who had helped her get there.

“I’m just so grateful that we got to show what we are working on in this great big moment,” she said, “and we got to show that together.”

Shiffrin now has more Olympic gold medals than any other U.S. Alpine skier in history—plus all of her other accolades. So where does America’s most decorated Alpine skier go now?

“We’re going to go back and watch my turns and probably analyze them and wonder what could have been better,” she said, “like we do after every single day.”