A grieving Mikaela Shiffrin is putting her skis back on, ‘trying to figure it all out again’

“How are you doing?” could be about her back, her skiing. Yet eight months after her father died in an accident in his own home, eight months after Shiffrin and her mother had to scramble back from Europe to get to his Colorado bedside, there are no innocuous questions, no simple answers. “How are you doing?” is endlessly complex.

“It’s a little bit tough to not feel what’s underlying everything,” Shiffrin said over FaceTime earlier this month. “When someone says, ‘How are you doing?’ it’s normally with this different tone. And I’m like, ‘We only have 30 seconds here. Can we realistically chat? I don’t know if you really want me to get into that.’

“And on a daily basis, I might be like, ‘Well, at this moment, my eyes are dry, and we’re having a conversation. I’d say that’s a pretty good moment.’”

She managed a chuckle, forced or not. She is 25 years old, both incredibly strong and undeniably vulnerable. In normal times, she is arguably the most dominant athlete on the planet, a three-time winner of the World Cup overall title, a two-time Olympic champion and three-time medalist, a threat to break all of her sport’s records. Among women, only recently retired American legend Lindsey Vonn amassed more than Shiffrin’s 66 race victories.

Given the current circumstances — a personal grieving process that hasn’t yet really begun, a global pandemic that confines the World Cup to Europe only, and unrest back home — all of those records and results feel like some form of small talk, too. The season begins Oct. 17 in Soelden, Austria, where Shiffrin had been training — until she tweaked her back, a development she announced Friday via Instagram. Her team does not believe there is reason for long-term concern. The prescription: head back to Colorado, rest and rehabilitate, and be better prepared for upcoming races in November and beyond.

In the past, such restraint has been hard for Shiffrin. She has always been a practice junkie, an athlete who has to be yanked from the mountain rather than pushed toward it, with hours of video analysis in between sessions. Now, with thoughts of her late father — Jeff Shiffrin was just 65 — unshakable from her brain, even completing a training session is trying.

“My capacity to focus is just so much smaller than it’s ever been,” Shiffrin said. “Focus is the thing I lean on. That’s my thing. Now, I can ski three runs and be like, ‘I can’t do this. I feel like it’s dangerous. I’m going to go do a run and make a turn and just break down in the middle of it.’

“In order to ski, I have to have a certain level of focus, and it just wasn’t there. Holding everything together and holding myself together for the duration of a training day, it still is hard. I’m getting that balance back. Some days are difficult, and some days are pretty okay.”

In the midst of current events, that might describe most of us: some days are difficult, and some days are pretty okay. After she and her mother, Eileen, raced home from Germany, after Jeff Shiffrin died, after the funeral, Mikaela made the decision in March to return to Europe to compete again, only to have the novel coronavirus pandemic sweep across the globe, wiping out the season’s final races. Then, she was like everyone else: At home and told to stay there, but also dealing with her father’s absence.

Eileen Shiffrin has been the visible member of Mikaela’s team since she first shepherded her teenage daughter around the world, breaking her into the World Cup as a mom, coach, driver, friend and advocate. Jeff, a college skier at Dartmouth who became a doctor, was comfortable in the background — hiking up the course to take photographs when he attended races, but staying at home in Colorado for much of the October-to-March World Cup season. In that role, he was essential. He paid the bills. He found the flights. From thousands of miles away, he made the Shiffrins’ chaotic world calm.

“On a daily basis, he was the first person we would go to to ask anything,” Shiffrin said. “Gosh, if we had poor Internet, how to fix that problem. He’d figure out what might work and how to get that to us. Right now, we would be asking him a billion questions about the pandemic and how we should travel, because he had real medical expertise to give. It’s just so much.”

Last month, before she returned to Europe to begin the season of unknowns, Shiffrin joined with the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association in announcing the formation of the Jeff Shiffrin Athlete Resiliency Fund, which is designed to raise money for athletes whose funding has suffered because of the pandemic. The USSA faces increased costs just to provide virus tests for the athletes. The next Winter Olympics — in Beijing — are just 16 months away, and six donor families have agreed to match up to $1.5 million in contributions to ensure training doesn’t suffer.

The money is important. But the idea behind the fund — resiliency — has Shiffrin considering her own situation. She said she used to think of a rubber band being stretched and stretched, becoming weaker and less resilient over time. Now, facing her first season without her father, she wants to redefine that.

“I don’t feel particularly strong on a daily basis,” Shiffrin said. “Most days for the past eight months, I have not felt strong at all. The physical strength is there. But just wanting to get out of bed is not really there very often.

“You look at athletes and heroes in sport, and it’s like, in order to be a champion athlete you have to be strong and courageous and brave and have no fear. And I think weakness is as much a part of becoming a champion as strength. You have to face those moments and get through it. There’s resiliency in that.”

During her time at home through spring and summer, Shiffrin also discovered a voice she didn’t know she had. The racial unrest that tore through the country would seem so far removed from the predominantly White world of Alpine skiing. But as Shiffrin watched protests and read about the cases — of George Floyd, of Breonna Taylor, on and on — she felt moved to use her Instagram account in ways she had never done before: Skiing and sit-ups replaced by social justice.

“My parents taught me not to be silent, but they also taught the importance of learning and listening — and listening before I speak,” Shiffrin said. “So I struggled with wanting to speak at all on certain topics because I hadn’t listened to everything everyone has to say. But on certain things, it becomes a matter of right and wrong, of literally having respect or not. It’s so obvious and clear.”

What’s not clear — given her back, given the pandemic, given the hole her father’s death leaves Eileen and Mikaela and her older brother Taylor — is what would constitute a successful World Cup season. Her norms are altered. Battling prerace nerves once all but defined her. “Now,” she said, “I’ll be embarrassed if I get nervous for a ski race.” Yet she still has no idea when she steps into the start gate for the first time in a competitive environment what — or who — she will feel.

“People kind of talk about: you can feel presences near you,” she said. “I don’t know, because right now I feel very naked, very unsecure and very insecure. Getting back into racing and seeing other athletes, it just feels like they’ve just been doing this and skiing and training and it’s all normal. Somehow, I feel like I’m a fish out of water, and I’m trying to figure it all out again.”

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