When you fail at the Olympics, there’s no private time for reflection and processing. Instead, there are cameras from every major international news network, in your face, immediately. And there are questions. What happened? What went wrong?

Mikaela Shiffrin, a four-time overall World Cup champion and widely considered the best active female alpine skier in the world, went through this process—some might call it a nightmare—not once, not twice, but five times at the Beijing Games in February.

For the first time since her Olympic debut at the Sochi 2014 Games, where she took gold in slalom, Shiffrin elected to compete in all five individual races—giant slalom, slalom, super-G, downhill and alpine combined—plus the mixed team parallel. She was just the second woman ever to compete in all six Olympics alpine events.

She had taken gold in giant slalom and silver in alpine combined at the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, and she finished just off the podium in slalom.

After those Games, Shiffrin, now 27, had acknowledged that her aspiration to win a gold medal in each of the five individual events was lofty—perhaps impossible. But ahead of Beijing, she was a favorite to at least make the podium in most of her races.

Instead, we all know what happened. Shiffrin recorded a “did not finish” in her first event, giant slalom—for the first time since January 2018, breaking a 30-race streak.

Then, in her second—and best—event, slalom, she took another DNF.

Shiffrin finished her third race, the super-G, placing ninth—an accomplishment considering how top-heavy that field of women is and the fact that it’s not Shiffrin’s best event.

As she continued to learn to shift her perspective and find the positives in her experience in Beijing, Shiffrin headed into her fourth event, her Olympic downhill debut, focused not on medals but simply on skiing her best. Finishing 18th, then, on a day with difficult conditions, was a win.

In her fifth individual race and last chance to win a medal, alpine combined, Shiffrin started out strong, in fifth place entering the slalom portion following the downhill portion. But the medal was not meant to be; she recorded her third DNF in five events.

In her final event, the mixed team parallel, Shiffrin and the U.S. just missed the podium, finishing in fourth.

“It's not always easy, but it's also not the end of the world to fail, fail twice. Fail 5 times. At the Olympics. (Enter me ...),” Shiffrin tweeted after her final individual race. “Why do I keep coming back? Gosh knows it hurts more than it feels good lately. I come back because those first 9 turns today were spectacular, really heaven. That's where I'm meant to be and I'm stubborn as s**t.”

And then, a month after the Olympics, Shiffrin was back on top of the world again. She clinched her fourth World Cup overall title, winning that coveted crystal globe to tie fellow American Lindsey Vonn for the second-most all time.

Shiffrin has experience with living out her life’s highest and lowest moments in the public eye. Almost exactly two years before the Beijing Games’ opening ceremony, her father, Jeff, had died after suffering a head injury in an accident at home.

Shiffrin has been navigating the unpredictable journey of grief—which she stresses is not a linear one—publicly, redefining her relationship to skiing in the process.

In an intimate essay published by The Players’ Tribune on Thursday, Shiffrin discussed all of it more candidly than she ever has before. Hers was the first essay in the site’s new Signature Stories series, which seeks to transform the traditional cover story into a 360-degree view of the athlete, combining first-person essays with with original video, audio and photography.

The day before her essay published, I spoke with Shiffrin—who is used to having her story being written about, not penning it herself—on the phone about what it was like to have more agency over her narrative and what she hopes readers take away from her piece.

“I just tried to explain the emotions that I go through from a more human perspective than what people see me as—Mikaela Shiffrin the Olympian, the ski racer, the World Cup winner,” she said. “There’s common misconception that as an athlete as long as you’re winning everything’s OK, and if you’re not winning, everything’s not OK. With this piece, it’s been so much about being able to put into words and tell the story that sort of that goes against that theory.”

In the beginning of her career, Shiffrin says—when she was racking up titles and world championships, winning her first World Cup race in December 2012 at age 17—her emotions tended to go in line with success and failure. “Everything made a lot more sense,” she said. “It’s much different now.”

As she dealt with the fallout of losing her father—and as, after a few months, she started to feel that the world had begun to move on without her—Shiffrin found it helpful to realize that others who came before her had experienced pain and sadness and tragedy and loss and had somehow come out okay.

“Not necessarily come out on the other side,” Shiffrin said, “but have just continued to go through life and have good moments, knowing it’s possible not necessarily to be OK but to find happiness, even though it’s not a linear process.”

In writing her essay, Shiffrin hopes to be that example for someone else—proving that, while loss and tragedy might never actually be overcome, it’s still possible to continue building a life and setting goals.

At the same time, there’s a little bit of apprehension that comes with sharing her experience so widely. Someone out there is probably going to read the article and it might strike a chord and help them through something, she says, but many others might be stuck on the concept of “you’re the one who’s supposed to help me escape my life.”

The recent examples of other athletes and Olympians—like Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka and Michael Phelps—who have spoken out about their mental health struggles have been welcomed by many, but not by all. After all, Shiffrin says, sports is entertainment—it’s understandable that the public would look to athletes to forget about their own struggles.

Elite athletes are almost expected to be robots—to consistently dominate, to never disappoint. They’re allowed to show emotion if it is the type of emotion we have prescribed for them.

“You can’t forever brush aside everything else that’s going on in your life and opinions you have and things you see,” Shiffrin said. “You build this platform if you succeed in sports and you start to realize all the things in life you care about, at least for some of them, you may be able to have an impact if you speak up.”

What she never wants to hear, Shiffrin stressed, is that experiences like the Beijing Olympics prove that she’s “just” human. “We’re all ‘just’ humans,” she said. “That’s actually a pretty beautiful thing, if you don’t put the word ‘just’ in front of it.”

Now that the competitive skiing season is over, Shiffrin has time to slow down and think about her goal-setting—for her training in the off-season, for the season to come, for the rest of her career. For so long, she says, her only goal in skiing has been simply to continue.

Of course, she can’t lie and say that, with 74 World Cup wins, the thought of overtaking Vonn (82) and Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark (86) for the most all-time hasn’t crossed her mind. It’s close...but it’s still far enough away that it could never happen.

“That record is not going to be the thing that defines my success in my career, Shiffrin said. “It’s already been successful—but I’m still here and still doing it. As I keep skiing in the next season or so I’m almost on a journey to find out what the goal needs to be and what my career is going to look like moving forward.”

And just as grief is not linear, progress isn’t, either, Shiffrin said. “In my case the grief is probably never going to go away; it doesn’t mean that you can’t have wonderful times and things to look forward to in your future.” And when it comes to goals, sometimes it’s not about designating some outcomes as “successes” and others as “failures.” The most important thing is to keep doing it.

“That’s what I hope people take away—the main point to tell this story is that sometimes it’s as simple as getting out of bed and putting one foot in front of the other,” Shiffrin said. “You don’t have to succeed every single day—you won’t succeed every single day. Sometimes all you’re doing is trying, and sometimes that’s enough.”

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