Was this an attempt to convince herself, a way of relieving the incredible pressure? In 2019, Shiffrin won the over-all title, and became the first skier in history to finish at the top of the standings in the slalom, giant slalom, and Super G. In twenty-nine races, she made the podium twenty-four times, and she had a record seventeen World Cup victories. She was poised to surpass Vonn as the greatest skier in history. Then her father died in an accident. The world shut down for COVID. In interviews, she talked about her self-doubts, her desire to speak out on social issues, her willingness to leave behind the perfect image she’d curated on Instagram. The pressure to ski perfectly, perhaps, was harder to shake, as was her grief. She went into the Beijing Olympics as one of the most hyped American athletes in competition, planning on entering six events. But she crashed in three of six races, and didn’t medal once—by her standards, a catastrophe. Afterward, she talked about the overwhelming expectations and described a “mind-body disconnect.”
She talked to reporters about measuring success independent of podium results, about mental health and persistent doubts, and about the unending process of grieving for her dad. She made herself a poster child for saying it’s O.K. to fail—sort of. The following January, she passed Vonn with her eighty-third World Cup title, and in March she won her eighty-seventh, breaking Stenmark’s record.
After retiring, Vonn walked with a limp. Her knees were a mess—particularly her right knee, which was more or less a tangle of scar tissue and cartilage. In 2024, she got a partial knee replacement, titanium implants that resurfaced the outer part, while leaving her core ligaments intact. It worked. Once she recovered, she was pain-free. And so, she decided to come back to skiing.
She returned that November. It was hard to guess what would happen: no one had tried to do what she was doing before. She was forty years old. She had been retired for five years. She had a partially replaced knee. Just being on skis in World Cup races made the comeback, in some respects, an unfathomable success. But Vonn has never been one for participation trophies. She persuaded an old friend, the Norwegian skier Aksel Lund Svindal—a two-time Olympic gold medallist and five-time world champion—to be her coach. In the off-season, she packed on muscle. Free of pain, she was finally liberated to train at length, and to toy with her equipment and refine her technique. She talked about being in as good a shape as she had ever been, of skiing fast and calmly instead of desperately. And it wasn’t just talk. In December, she won the first World Cup downhill race of the season—and then won another. She made it onto five consecutive podiums. With the Olympics approaching, she was one of the favorites.
Shiffrin, meanwhile, was pursuing her own comeback. She crashed in Killington at the end of November, 2024, in a giant-slalom race, and something, probably the tip of a gate, pierced her abdomen, nearly puncturing her colon and ripping through her core. She had to relearn how to use her stomach muscles as they reknit together—an experience she described to the Athletic as “grueling.” But she saw an upside: as she rebuilt her obliques, she learned how to engage her muscles and move her torso correctly, without compensating for weaknesses. Skiing is not the only thing that should be done with proper technique.