88 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 11.19
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A great deal of ski racing, Shiffrin told me last summer at a photo studio in Los Angeles, is
logistics management. How do you get thirty or forty pairs of skis, seven pairs of ski boots, plus speed suits and poles and
helmets and goggles across Europe, during winter, on time, without losing anything? It’s a challenge that doubles or triples
if you plan to race in all six of skiing’s disciplines, which almost nobody else does, because that’s crazy.
Two days before the World Championships began last February, in Are, Sweden, Shiffrin had raced and won a slalom
in Maribor, Slovenia. Only a few skiers planned to race both the Maribor slalom and the super-G in Are, but Shiffrin was
one of them, which meant she needed to charter a plane from Slovenia to Sweden to give herself a day of training before
the World’s race began. She arrived on time, but her coaches and much of her equipment did not. That meant she and her
mother, Eileen, had to go on a hunt to find basic pieces of equipment, including gloves and a pair of goggles that complied
with International Ski Federation rules. She won the super-G, but other problems arose: although her coaches eventually
arrived, their bags did not, and they needed to rent ski clothes. Then Shiffrin got sick.
Every professional skier races through a cold now and then, but this wasn’t just a cold. Shiffrin had a chest infection,
and it was causing her coughing fits. It left an impression: I had arrived at the L.A. photo studio with a set of detailed
questions, but she spent roughly 30 minutes telling me about the cough. It started with dizziness, a fever, and weakness.
“Every time I moved, my heart rate would spike. I’d breathe harder, and then I’d have a coughing fit,” she said. She began
to fear even limited movement. Before the slalom, lying on a bench in the ski lodge, she had a fit so violent that it knocked
her over and left her convulsing on the floor underneath a table.
Shiffrin skied the first slalom run at 70 percent effort, she said, which put her 0.15 seconds out of first. In Are, slalom racers
come off the chairlift, take a left turn, and ski down a cat track and under a bridge to the start gate. Before the second run, as
Shiffrin approached the bridge with her physiotherapist and Eileen, another coughing fit started, this time with a twist: she
- the bionic woman