With loss in best event, a piece of Shiffrin’s heart breaks off
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA » As skier Mikaela Shiffrin hopes for a medal in the slalom faded, the chants of “U-S-A!” were closer to a whisper than a scream.
What if they held an Olympic ski race, and nobody came?
“It’s disapppointing,” Shiffrin said Friday, after she finished the slalom in the worst place at the Olympics: fourth place. She chewed on the unsavory result through gritted teeth, her face plastered with a rough mix of shock and defeat.
“Every single loss that I’ve ever had, I remember that feeling — ugh — so thoroughly,” said Shiffrin. “It’s like a piece of my heart breaks off and I can never get it back.”
Jangled nerves caused her to vomit prior to competing. In her best event on the hill, Shiffrin kicked herself for skiing conservatively from the start. It all added up to missing the podium by half a hiccup, only eight one-hundreths of a second behind Austrian Katharina Gallhuber, the bronze medalist.
Frida Hansdotter will take home the gold to Sweden. Shiffrin looked like a skier that lost her equilibrium after the emotional roller-coaster ride of her triumphant Olympic debut in the giant slalom only 24 hours earlier. “I beat myself in the wrong way today,” Shiffrin admitted..
She had the look of an athlete that was emotionally spent, and appeared in desperate need of an infusion of energy. At a time she could’ve used a noisy crowd to pump her up, almost nobody showed up to the Yongpyong Alpine Centre.
When Shiffrin chopped down a maze of gates and leaned into the finish line at the conclusion of her second slalom run on a beautiful winter afternoon, there was a grand total of 372 spectators, either sitting in the stadium or standing on the snow at the venue. I know, because I counted each and every one of them. It wasn’t difficult.
“Skiing in Korea is not that popular. That’s very sad. Mikaela Shiffrin is a big sports star, but she is not a big star here,” said C.K. Park of Seoul, one of the very rare Korean faces in the small crowd.
The nearly empty grandstands at a venue with capacity for 6,000 spectators gave Shiffrin’s quest for her second medal at the Winter Games the vibe of a jayvee football game. There might have been millions of American fans back home cheerin.
But her live audience at the mountain on a sun-splashed Friday in South Korea was basically a family picnic.
While there’s no way I can parachute into the Korean peninsula and immediately grasp what makes people tick, I feel confident in saying: women’s skiing does not churn the locals’ butter. This is not Austria. Ski culture? There is none here. Should that matter to the International Olympic Committee? Well, with the next Winter Games scheduled for China in 2022, maybe it’s the ring of the cash register rather than the clang of the cowbell that counts most.
Shiffrin is a real, big deal in the ski world. But she’s nothing in South Korea compared to Seollal, a national holiday that celebrates the lunar new year. As Shiffrin buckled her boots Friday, local families gathered for Seollal, many dressed in traditional clothing to eat tteokguk, a good-luck soup whose main ingredient is sliced rice cakes.
In other words, Koreans had more important stuff to do than watch Shiffrin dance down the mountain through the slalom gates.
Racing for the second time in two days, Shiffrin’s legs were lifeless, but not nearly as dead as the crowd.
The rows and rows of empty seats in the stands were a strange sight, as if LeBron James were playing Game 2 of the NBA Finals in a nearly empty, high-school gym. The few fans wearing red, white and blue did what little they could to make Shiffrin feel the love from back home.
“Whenever an American races, the excitement of the moment makes you feel a responsibility to cheer,” Eric Franz, a proud Cleveland resident.
What if they invited Olympians to ski in South Korea and almost no fans showed up? I guess that’s what happens when you put a big race in a place where Shiffrin has no Gangnam Style cred.
If a little piece of her heart breaks in the alpine woods and nobody hears, does it count?