By Grace Kaiser
Mikaela Shiffrin is arguably the greatest slalom skier of all time, with more World Cup victories than any other and an Olympic gold at 18. Mikaela Shiffrin came into the 2022 Tokyo Olympics expected to do great things on both the Giant Slalom and Slalom, being a contender for gold, but it quickly went awry. She skied out on the Giant Slalom. This was a shock to everyone around the world, her being the best, but everyone knew she still had a chance at redemption in the normal Slalom event. Despite this, people continued to talk about her fall. Any time you’d turn on the Olympic channel, you would hear her name pop up and speculation about what had happened and what would happen on her next event. She went into the Slalom event with the commentators questioning what would happen, but still believing she would stick it, but she once again skied out. Naturally, she was visibly upset; she went from a chance at gold in two events to skiing out of both of them. She sat on the sidelines with her head on her knees. Now, natural human decency would be to look away and let a person have some time to themselves if they just failed on a world stage.
Now, Shiffrin did tweet that she was grateful to have the support she did after her falls, but the fact that support isn’t the default is a problem. Obviously, being at the Olympics comes with the knowledge that your actions will be public, but human decency and sympathy should still be in play. Nevertheless, instead of turning the camera and focusing on going forward in the event and giving her time to herself, the camera stayed on her for an extended period of time, with the commentators continuously gaping and speculating about what happened.
She did come out in the Super G, an event new to her at the Olympics, and finish; she didn’t place, but finishing was a good sign that maybe she was recovering and recuperating mentally. Mikaela has two more events, the downhill and combined, so she can continue to show her resilience and skill in those. So, maybe it was all in her head. Maybe she had heard the entire world talking about her mistake at the first event, and that’s all she could think about in the second. When the entire world is talking about your failure and speculating about your skills, that will have a mental impact on someone, and hopefully she has learned to be able to drown it out, but she shouldn’t have to learn to drown it out in the first place.
So, the question is, why do we put more pressure on the best athletes in the world than they already put on themselves? You don’t think that she was already upset with herself, going over and over how not to make that mistake again? Being an elite athlete, you’re going to be on the world stage, but maybe the world should do a better job at acknowledging how hard that already is, and not tear apart these athletes, remember that they are still human beings, they’re not perfect, they’re not invincible, and they definitely don’t owe us anything.
