TEEN SNOW ANGEL
Shiffrin, at 18, youngest to win slalom
KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — American teenage skiing sensation Mikaela Shiffrin won the gold medal in women’s slalom Friday night, becoming the discipline’s youngest ever Olympic champion and throwing in some near-crash theatrics to keep it interesting.
Shiffrin, born in Colorado in 1995 and raised on the short and icy slopes of New England, drew gasps from her audience with a brief loss of control in her second run down a white stripe of snow that glistened under powerful floodlights. She recovered to finish ahead of Austrians Marlies Schild and Kathin Zettel.
“It’s hard to put into words how incredible this is,” said Shiffrin, who claimed she cried on the chairlift after winning the first run and realizing how close she was to fulfilling her dream.
T he poised a nd upbeat 18-year-old described the “pretty crazy moment” in her second run when her line through a thick combination of gates generated excess speed that forced her to lose contact with the snow and then pressure her skis hard, dumping some speed but staying in the race.
“I’m like, ‘ I’m not going to make it! I’m not going to make it!’ ” Shiffrin recalled. “Threw in a hockey stop right there, that was a little bit tough, but it’s just getting back into it as soon as possible. Your skis can make some tight fast turns if you just make them.”
Shiffrin had the sixth-fastest time on the second run, but that was good enough for a tworun combined time of 1 minute, 44.54 seconds, which was 0.81 seconds ahead of Zettel and 0.53 in front of Schild, who was Shiffrin’s childhood idol and at 32 is one of the greatest slalom racers of all time.
“It’s hard to describe how much I looked up to them,” Shiffrin said of the two women who joined her on the podium. (Zettel disclosed after the race that her 92-year-old grandmother had died on Tuesday.)
Slalom is Alpine skiing’s most technical discipline, rewarding agility and balance. Racers wear armor to clear gates out of the way and use short, hourglass shaped skis to carve turns so tight their boots brush against the base of the gates.
Already the reigning world champion in the discipline, Shiffrin is the first American woman Olympic slalom champion since 1972, when Barbara Ann Cochran of Vermont won gold at the Sapporo Games. Shiffin is also the fifth-youngest female gold medalist in Alpine skiing history, according to the U.S. ski team.
Born in Vail on March 13, 1995, Shiffrin was raised with world-class training opportunities. Her parents, Jeff and Eileen, were avid about sports, particularly skiing. In an interview last year, Eileen Shiffrin said her
husband, who raced on the B team at Dartmouth College, was a huge influence on young Mikaela’s technique.
“Jeff is the most beautiful skier I’ve ever seen in my life,” she said. ‘Not necessarily the fastest, but technically, everyone would always say ‘Oh my God.’ Anything — powder, ice. That’s one of the things that really helped Mikaela so much. He was always really particular about her arms and making sure she was really disciplined about everything. We didn’t want her to get hurt.”
The Shiffrin family moved in 2003 to New Hampshire, where Mikaela and her brother trained at tiny Storr’s Hill, and also at Whaleback and the Dartmouth Skiway. In 2008 she started attending Burke Mountain Academy, the famous ski school in Vermont, and was racing on the World Cup tour by age 15.
Last year she won the World Cup slalom discipline title, which goes to the racer with the best performance over the whole season.
“She’s racing like an athlete that competed on the World Cup for many years,” said Schild, the silver medalist. “She’s good in every condition and she skies really smooth. I like to watch her.”
The U.S. Alpine team has now collected five Olympic medals from five racers at Sochi: Bode Miller took bronze in super-G, where Andrew Weibrecht won the silver; Julia Mancuso won bronze in super combined; and Ted Ligety won the gold in giant slalom.
The next step for Shiffrin, who has called Miller her favorite racer, will likely be to branch out into the speed events like he did and try to become a potent multievent podium threat by the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea.
NOT SHUT OUT
Eddy Alvarez, J.R. Celski, Creveling and Jordan Malone took silver in 5,000-meter shorttrack relay for the first U.S. medal in speedskating at the Sochi Games. The U.S. speedskaters were shut out in 12 long track events, and had failed to get on the podium in the first seven short track races. The medal helped the Americans avoid a shutout for the first time since 1998 in Nagano.