CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Here it comes, Mikaela Shiffrin’s last stand.
Just like that, Alpine skiing has arrived at its final event, the women’s slalom. Fittingly, it’s also Shiffrin’s last chance for a medal in Milan Cortina.
Shiffrin, the Alpine skiing GOAT, has not won an Olympic medal since 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea. She was 22 then, a threat in slalom and downhill and everything in between. So much of her career and so many Olympic races left.
She’s 30 now (and turns 31 next month). She’s won 108 World Cup races. No one has won more. Her legacy is secure. One day, someone might win more. It will be a while.
She’s also engaged. She has said that at some point she wants to start a family. She’s been competing on the World Cup for 15 years. Will she race in another Olympic Games? Only she knows.
That’s also the last thing Shiffrin needs to be thinking about in the starting gate. Beijing was a disaster. By the numbers, Cortina has not been great. No medals in two events.
Now comes the last shot.
The slalom queen
To watch Shiffrin ski slalom is what it must have been like watching Ted Williams swing a baseball bat.
When she is on, she dances through those gates with so much grace, she makes something incredibly difficult appear effortless. She’s achieving that perfect equilibrium with gravity, the mountain, and her skis. It’s an absolute work of art, skiing apotheosis.
Some numbers.
Those 108 World Cup victories, 71 of them have come in slalom. She’s been on the podium another 26 times in slalom. She’s won the season-long slalom championship nine times in 15 years.
Her win rate for all disciplines is better than once every three races. Her win rate in slalom is 71 for 126, or better than one out of two. If she were a baseball player, that would be like hitting a home run on 56 percent of at-bats.
Her podium rate in slalom is even more silly, 97 for 126, or 76 percent. Historically speaking, her chances of getting a medal Wednesday on the Olympia delle Tofane slope should be three in four.
Shiffrin has been nearly unbeatable in the slalom this World Cup season. In the team combined event at these Olympics, though, she had her worst outing of the year. (Christian Bruna / Getty Images)
The Olympics are different
Yes, they are. Ask Ilia Malinin, who could not stay upright Friday in the men’s figure skating competition despite being a generational talent and the reigning world champion.
Or ask Shiffrin. She won on her first shot, in Sochi in 2014, when she was 18. Four years later, she had to contend with a scrambled schedule due to weather delays that had her competing in slalom the day after she won the gold medal in giant slalom.
She didn’t get back from a medal ceremony until the middle of the night. She missed the podium by eight hundredths of a second.
Then came Beijing. She crashed three times in six races and spent the past four years answering questions about it.
Skiing is a niche sport in the U.S. for three years and 50 weeks. She’s a huge star in Europe who can exist in relative anonymity at home. Then the Olympics arrive, and she’s suddenly the star quarterback of a team playing in the Super Bowl.
She has some good Olympic memories, she says. She’s also compared the Olympic Games to a “mosquito,” and with good reason.
The form
Shiffrin arrived at the Olympics in the midst of an all-time great slalom season. She’s won seven of eight races and has already wrapped up the season title.
She was getting better in giant slalom, too. She landed on the podium in her last race just before the Olympics.
In Cortina, she’s not been great. In the team combined, she skied her worst slalom run of the season, finishing 15th out of 18 skiers, a performance that cost her and Breezy Johnson a medal. Johnson had skied the fastest downhill. After Shiffrin’s slalom, they were fourth.
In giant slalom, Shiffrin was 11th, her second-worst performance of the season in that discipline.
She’s fit, but is she in form? That all depends on what information is most pertinent. She’s as good as she has ever been for the season — seven firsts and one second. But the past week? Not great.
The conditions
The snow was sloppy for that team combined slalom run. Shiffrin thrives on hard, dry, fast snow.
For the most part, the more zig-zaggy the course, the better she is, because no one can maintain speed while switching direction as she can. The course set-up that day had some straight sections, and at least one of the slalom runs Wednesday should be similar to that.
There’s been a lot of snow in the Dolomites the past few days. Organizers will have their work cut out for them to deliver a clean track, but they have a reputation for meeting the moment. Also, Wednesday is supposed to be cold, a low of 10 degrees Farenheit and a high of 24.
Here’s the thing — no one wins 71 slalom races and gets on the slalom podium 97 times without winning in every kind of condition and on every sort of course.
The moment
Here she is, at her last stand in Cortina, and maybe even at the Olympics.
What does Shiffrin need to do to capture another Olympic medal, even a gold? Maybe just the easiest and hardest thing there is — be the version of herself in a slalom race that has shown up somewhere between 60-75 percent of the time during the last 15 years.
No problem, right?
Wrong.
The Olympics are different.