Mikaela Shiffrin Competes in One Last Race, the Combined Workforce Occasion
Mikaela Shiffrin got here into the Beijing Olympics with the objective of competing in 5 occasions. She did so, although she fell wanting her bigger ambitions when she failed to complete three races and positioned ninth and 18th in two others.
She is now competing for the US workforce in her sixth occasion on Sunday, the one mixed-gender ski racing occasion on the Winter Video games. It’s Shiffrin’s closing alternative to win a medal at these Video games.
Shiffrin and her U.S. teammates have superior to the occasion’s semifinals after beating Slovakia and Italy.
The occasion, happening for the second time at an Olympics, resembles parallel slalom, the place skiers go head-to-head on an identical programs. Two ladies and two males from every nation compete, every racing an opponent of the identical gender. A workforce advances to the subsequent spherical if it wins three of those races; if the groups tie, 2-2, the winner is the workforce with one of the best mixed time from its 4 skiers.
Within the quarterfinal towards Italy, the US received, 3-1, after Shiffrin misplaced her race by simply two-hundredths of a second.
The occasion is extra a celebration of snowboarding than an intense particular person battle for medals, although it might present a happier ending for Shiffrin’s Beijing Olympics journey.
However on Thursday, after her third disqualification in a person race, she was already reflecting on how it had gone so wrong.
“Proper now,” Shiffrin stated, “I simply really feel like a joke.”
Shiffrin arrived in Beijing favored to win a number of medals in a profession that already had produced two golds and a silver, the subsequent step in her quest to change into essentially the most adorned skier ever to compete on the worldwide stage. As a substitute, her journey turned a celebrity’s staredown with an abyss: two DNFs (didn’t end) in large slalom and slalom, adopted by ninth- and 18th-place finishes in super-G and downhill, after which one final DNF in mixed Thursday.
On Twitter, Shiffrin shared some indignant messages she had acquired after her disappointing performances. However in a video posted to the site, she stated she simply ignored those that tried to shake her confidence.
“You possibly can select to take them, and dwell on them, and allow them to make you need to retire, allow them to make you need to disappear and simply by no means be seen once more,” she stated. “Or you’ll be able to simply say, ‘Hey, I’ve bought an ideal humorousness, and I’ve bought much more to present to this world, so again off and let me do my factor.’ And I feel lots of you on the market who could be experiencing these hate messages, I feel lots of you may have that fireside in you, so that you simply go for it.”