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coughed so hard she threw up.
(Beginning around 2016, Shiffrin
started puking before important
races. But this vomiting, she told
me, was different from vomiting
caused by nerves.)
Eileen is Shiffrin’s mother but
also her best friend, and it must
be said, she’s not a softie. After
the vomiting concluded, Eileen
told Shiffrin that she didn’t need
to race if she didn’t want to. That
was a shock. Inside ski racing, a
World Championship title is
more coveted than an Olympic
medal, and Eileen is often an un-
yielding coach. Her permission
to sit out the event took some
of the pressure off. Suddenly a
chest infection didn’t seem like
such a big deal, and Shiffrin de-
cided to race. She won by more
than half a second. It was a les-
son in resilience.
A YEAR earlier, before the Olym-
pics in South Korea, Shiffrin
made the mistake of mention-
ing that she might like to win
five gold medals, which was
never going to be an easy goal.
There was the media, which is a
given, and also Shiffrin’s nervy
stomach, and a crappy stretch
of weather that wrecked a care-
fully planned race schedule.
She started out strong, win-
ning the opening giant slalom.
Then a series of wind-related
delays arrived, she backed out
of the downhill and the super-
G, flubbed a gate in slalom, and
missed the top spot in super
combined (two races of slalom,
and a run of super-G) by nine-
tenths of a second. She won a
gold and a silver—not bad—but
didn’t come close to five medals.
“The Olympics were a big suc-
cess,” she said. “But there’s a lit-
tle piece of my heart that aches
for the slalom race and wonders
what I could have done better.”
Then came Shiffrin’s 2018–19
season, during which she won
17 World Cup races (a record),
stood atop the podium in four
different events, captured World
Championship gold medals in
both the slalom and the super-G
(also a first), and won both the
overall title as well as discipline
titles in slalom, giant slalom,
and super-G. Sometimes my
eyes glaze over when I see sta-
tistics like these: Shiffrin wins
races at a pace so frantic it’s hard
to comprehend.
One could be forgiven for as-
suming, as I did, that her his-
toric season owed something to
post-Olympic relaxation, which
allowed Shiffrin to regain her
flow after briefly misplacing it
in South Korea. Well, that’s not
what happened.
“The intensity, truthfully, has
gone up,” her coach Jeff Lackie
said. Global fame and the ad-
dition of super-G and downhill
to her race schedule have added
hassle and stress, and they make
it tougher to do everything right.
“Any time you’ve achieved the
success that she’s achieved, the
stakes go up, the expectations go
up,” he said. “Suddenly, you’vegot Bode Miller weighing in on
your career, someone you grew
up idolizing. As focused and in-
tense as she is, it’s hard not to be
aware of that stuff. It’s not det-
rimental, but it’s something that
needs to be managed.”
Shiffrin has given these pres-
sures a characteristically posi-
tive frame. Bearing down and
focusing is familiar, and there-
fore calming, she told me. “If I
have to focus harder, that’s never
been a problem for me,” she said.
“Adding more events is a chal-
lenge—it’s like a puzzle.”IN PERSON, Shiffrin is about
what you’d expect if you fol-
low her on Instagram: bubbly,
charming, intelligent, self-
aware. She answers questions
not in complete sentences but
complete paragraphs, and often
in story form. She loves talking
about ski racing.
You don’t have to look tooclosely to see that Shiffrin does
a few things different than her
World Cup competitors. No
surprise there—since her debut
in 2011, she’s won 60 World
Cup races and two Olympic gold
medals, and she’s well on her
way to becoming the best ski
racer in the history of the sport.
You don’t come by that kind of
dominance by doing things the
way they’ve always been done.
To take one example: Shiffrin
and Lackie are obsessive about
logging data from her workouts.
This might seem like a small
thing—haven’t athletes always
kept training logs?—except that
in ski racing, it’s not. There are
gym sessions to keep track of
(a lot of them), plus days spent
on the hill, plus data from the
various recording devices Shif-
frin uses, including a heart-ratemonitor and a device that mea-
sures the velocity at which she
performs squats. (Why is this
important? Slalom racing re-
quires that Shiffrin contract her
leg muscles faster than during
downhill races, and the velocity
monitor allows her to tune her
muscle coordination appropri-
ately.) When we met in Los An-
geles, she told me she had just
begun using a gadget that she
places underneath her mattress
to measure sleep quality.
Putting together this moun-
tain of data allows Shiffrin and
Lackie to figure out exactly
how hard to push, and when,
and when to back off. Some
of the data is subjective, some
isn’t. Lackie analyzes the input
with data-visualization soft-
ware, but if Shiffrin forgets to
log her workouts, even for a
day, the whole thing becomes
a bit worthless. The point is,
even data management is a lotof work. Hardly anyone else is
willing to do it, and it’s another
place where Shiffrin is working
harder than almost everyone she
races against.IN THE PAST 20 or so years,
we’ve learned a lot about how to
mold great athletes. Winning at
the global level takes a lot more
than just talent, especially if
you’re in it for the long haul. As
a result, there isn’t much low-
hanging fruit left in professional
sports—no room for the foot-
loose rogues like Bode Miller. To
be the best at ski racing means
being the most physically tal-
ented, the most emotionally
mature, and the hardest work-
ing in the gym. It means training
with the best coaches, skiing on
the fastest skis, and practicing
turns from the moment you step
off the chairlift to the moment
you get back on it. Shiffrin is
famous for her consistency: she
never misses gates during train-
ing, never skips a day in the gym,
never forgets her nap, never gets
lazy about data logging, never
loses a whole season to injury.
Does this make Shiffrin an in-
novator? Well, nobody has ever
won as much as quickly as she
has, in as many different kinds
of races. Winning that much
is in fact quite innovative—it’s
brand new.
Working with Shiffrin has
made Lackie a better coach, he
says. Because she’s so consistent
in her approach, the moment
she stops improving, he knows
it’s because he made a mistake.
The reason Shiffrin wins so
often isn’t that she makes bet-
ter turns than anyone else in
ski racing, though of course she
sometimes does—she certainly
can. It’s that from turn to turn,
she’s always pretty good. Other
racers are mostly pretty good,
and then, for a second or two,
they’re slightly less good. That’s
where Shiffrin gets the edge. OOUTSIDE CORRESPON-
DENT PETER VIGNERON
( @PETERVIGNERON)
PROFILED ULTRA RUNNER
JIM WALMSLEY FOR OUTSIDE
ONLINE IN JUNE 2018.You don’t have to look too
closely to see that
Shiffrin does a few things
different than her World
Cup competitors.