Beijing Winter Olympic Games 2022 - Mikaela Shiffrin has no one to apologise to

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

It wasn’t supposed to be anything close to this.

Defeat is always possible, especially for someone as supremely talented and dominant as Mikaela Shiffrin. The way Petra Vlhova has been skiing this season (she deserves every ounce of credit possible for what it’s worth) certainly meant that a silver or even a bronze was well within the realms of possibility. Gold was not a forgone conclusion by any means.

Heck, even a freak of nature occurrence like getting hit by a bird during a run seemed more plausible than what we’ve witnessed over the last few days.

Because in both the giant slalom and slalom, the two disciplines where Shiffrin excels above pretty much everyone else in the history of the sport, she has twice made errors that were not just uncharacteristic, but actually mind-boggling when you consider the prowess of the person committing them.

To put this into perspective the last time Shiffrin DNFed in consecutive technical races was back in 2011, when she was just 16.

As a result we watched a hugely disheartened Shiffrin who in her post-race interviews was questioning everything, from her process to her continuation in Beijing.

"I will try to re-set again. Maybe try to re-set better this time but I also don't know how to do better because I just don't.

“We came all this way. We’re not done yet but those were my biggest focuses, so it really feels like a lot of work for nothing,

“(People) will try to say, 'this happens’ and 'it’s OK’ and 'don’t be too hard on yourself’ and all of that, but it is a lot of work for a grand total of five gates in the GS and five gates in the slalom. So that is not lost on me.”

“I just wanted to take a pause and try to process or understand what I did wrong.”

Watching the footage of Shiffrin sitting on the side of the track after crashing out (certainly for too long, a few seconds would have painted the picture adequately), questioning everything, and then listening to her post-race it’s hard not to feel for her. Ultimately she is still at heart a little kid who just loves skiing, nothing more nothing less. When things don’t go her way it hurts her just like it hurts us when things don’t go our way. Despite what you may think she doesn’t have an extra bit of DNA that makes her immune to the feelings that come with failure.

So when you start to listen or watch some of the talking heads in the aftermath of the race, or read some of the comments online, it’s equally hard not to wonder whether these people watch the same footage or listen to the same words that you do. For anyone to suggest that Shiffrin needs to apologise, or even that she has let down her country is astonishingly misguided, egotistical and clueless.

But it’s hardly surprising. We live in a society where big tech companies allow their users to send racist, misogynistic, homophobic and death-threatening comments and the best they can offer when these are reported is something along the lines of “we are looking into it.”

Mikaela Shiffrin has dedicated her life to skiing. As an American she has had to sacrifice far more than her European counterparts, she is away from her family for large parts of the year and in a sport where English is not the dominant language, can be isolated on occasion. Yet she is relentless in her pursuit of excellence, no-one is a tougher critic than her. She never stops looking for ways to find an edge and try and eek out every drop of the talent she has.

That has brought her to unprecedented levels. She is already third on the all-time World Cup wins list despite being just 26. She already has more wins in a single discipline (47 slalom wins) than anyone else in history. She’s a triple-World Cup overall champion, six-time world champion gold medallist and only five women in history have won more than her two Olympic Alpine gold medals.

She has not just followed in the footsteps of the likes of Lindsey Vonn and Ted Ligety she has blazed her own path. If she carries on at her current pace she will blow past Vonn and Ingemar Stenmark for most World Cup wins ever, if she chooses to do so she has every chance of adding more Olympic medals both now in Beijing and in four years time in Italy.

The whole time she has done this whilst being one of, if not the most, accessible skiers on the circuit. Shiffrin is constantly booked up but will always do press stuff when time allows both while on tour and when at home in America. Fans get to see the real her thanks to her Instagram and Twitter posts as well as various videos done with the US Ski team and other partners.

And perhaps most importantly of all, she has brought a new level of openness to skiing when it comes to talking about mental health. In the past few years (and particularly since the passing of her father Jeff) Shiffrin has been extremely candid about the various pressures and motivations that come with elite sport. This is not the first time she has questioned herself in the sport and it probably won’t be the last. It is just not something you see from most elite athletes.

And how do we reward her?

By piling the pressure on further. More comments online, more questions about pressure, more questions about her father, questions about what went wrong, TV analysis, podcast discussions, online debate.

Sometimes elite athletes f*** up.

And as a society we need to be okay with that.

These are not robots, these are human beings. Most of us cannot being to imagine the pressure we put on these people. But all of us can be empathetic to the feeling of when it doesn’t go the way we hoped.

Did we learn nothing from Simone Biles last summer? As a society how many sportspeople do we have to break before we learn our lesson?

Skiing has previous for this too. A couple of years ago at the age of 30 Marcel Hirscher announced his retirement before the 2019-20 season. Hirscher is right up there with Shiffrin, Vonn and Stenmark in the GOAT conversation but he decided the pressure from his home media in Austria and others was too much, it was taking too great a toll on him. Would anyone be surprised if at some stage before Cortina 2026 Shiffrin decided to do the same?

If anyone needs to apologise it is us. We need to apologise to Shiffrin as fans for putting too much pressure on her. We need to apologise as the media for the insensitive and often unrelenting line of questions we put to her and promise to try and do better, we need to apologise as a society for the entitled way we treat athletes like Shiffrin. Governments and tech leaders need to apologise for the way they have allowed hate to triumph over love.

But Shiffrin apologise to us? Not a chance.

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