The Olympics were only five weeks away, and the most prominent Team USA athlete was sequestered in a hotel room in Austria, reduced to doing pull-ups on her bed frame, lunges with a single 15-kilogram plate and knocking on the wall to say hi to her mother in the adjacent room. This is not how a two-time gold medalist is supposed to prepare for winning more gold medals. But covid doesn’t care if the Olympics are afoot, so here was Mikaela Shirin, coughing and with a sore throat, in quarantine when she should have been skied racing.
“I’ve never taken more than four days off of skiing in the season in my whole career,” Shirin said Thursday by phone from Austria. “I think, in my entire life, I’ve never done that. I was like: Oh my gosh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
With the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Winter Games on Friday, Shirin is over covid, out of isolation and back on the mountain. She has even won again on the World Cup circuit,
in circumstances that brought about an unprecedented outpouring of emotion — which we’ll get to.
But here’s the thing about being Mikaela Shirin in 2022: She is the 26-year-old American face of the Games, the athlete NBC tabbed to skiing race with dinosaurs while cross-promoting a new “Jurassic Park” film, the personality most likely to appear on the “Today” show, the most familiar and famous of the 223 athletes who make up Team USA. Translation: As much as any American athlete, her results in China will be binary. Racing in as many as five alpine events, she will either win or she will lose. She will, maybe a or she won’t.
But the context of this season is more complex than that. As she took a breath from recapping it all Thursday, she distilled it thus: “There’s a lot going on there, and we’re not even at the Olympics yet.” The context isn’t just those pull-ups on a hotel bed frame in a desperate attempt to maintain some form of fitness. The context is perhaps best displayed by Shirin’s head, buried in her own arms as she leaned on a wall at the bottom of a racecourse in scheming, Austria. She had just won her 47th World Cup slalom race, giving her more victories in a single alpine discipline than anyone in history. And she was absolutely bawling.
She tried. The answer took 22 minutes. It involved covid, quarantine, memories of her late father, missing races, training before dawn wearing a headlamp to light the course, feeling as if she might not even do the second slalom run at Scheming, and so much more wedged among the headlines. The short version is this: “It felt like I had just kind of run out of other sources of fuel right in between runs at scheming.” After a mediocre first run left her fifth, behind, among others, Petra Altova of Slovakia — her chief competition in the technical races, all season and heading into Beijing — she was a lethal combination of exhausted and confused.
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