About Mikaela Shiffrin
Background&Early Years
Born in Vail, Colorado,Shiffrin is the second child of Eileen (née Condron) and Jeff Shiffrin, both originally from the Northeastern United States and former ski racers.Her paternal grandfather was Jewish.Shiffrin's father Jeff grew up in New Jersey and was an avid skier on weekends in Vermont with his family. As an undergraduate, he raced for Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.Her mother Eileen raced in high school in northwestern Massachusetts in the Berkshires,and her brother Taylor (born 1992) raced for the University of Denver.
When Mikaela was eight in 2003, the family moved to rural New Hampshire near Lyme,where her father, an anesthesiologist, worked at Dartmouth–Hitchcock Medical Center. After five years, he took a new job in Denver;Shiffrin's older brother Taylor was in high school at Burke Mountain Academy, a ski academy in northeastern Vermont, and stayed in the east. Shiffrin also attended middle school at Burke but went with her parents to Colorado before returning to Burke.
From a young age, Mikaela had strong results in major competitions. In March 2010, at age 14, she won both the slalom and GS at the Topolino Games in Italy, against skiers from 40 nations.The following winter, now meeting the FIS minimum age requirement of 15 years, she won a Nor-Am Cup super combined race in December 2010 at Panorama, British Columbia, only the eighth FIS-level race in which she had competed. Shiffrin followed it up with three podiums in her next three Nor-Am races: runner-up in a super-G, third in a GS, and victory in a slalom. Weeks later, she won a pair of Nor-Am slalom races held at Sunday River, Maine. A month later, Shiffrin took the slalom bronze medal at the FIS Junior World Ski Championships held at Crans-Montana, Switzerland (after having been down with a stomach virus the day before).In January 2015, Shiffrin named Croatian former ski racer Janica Kostelić and American Bode Miller as her idols while growing up. Since 2021, she is in a relationship with fellow skier Aleksander Aamodt Kilde.
Statistics
By winning her second Olympic gold medal in the 2018 giant slalom, Shiffrin tied Ted Ligety and Andrea Mead Lawrence for the most Olympic gold medals ever won by an American Olympian in alpine skiing. She is one of only 5 Americans to ever win the World Cup overall title. In World Championships, she is the most decorated American alpine skier in history, having won the most medals (14) overall, a record seven of them gold.She is also the first and only athlete—male or female—with wins in all six FIS Alpine Ski World Cup disciplines. She has won World Cup races in ladies' slalom, parallel slalom, giant slalom, super-G, downhill, and alpine combined. She is the youngest skier—male or female—to win 50 World Cup races, doing so at the age of 23 years and 9 months.
She has won 87 World Cup races,overtaking Ingemar Stenmark for the most World Cup wins by any alpine skier,including 53 slalom races, the most won by any alpine skier in any discipline, and 21 giant slalom races, the most by any female alpine skier. Regardless of gender, Shiffrin is the only athlete to have won 15 races in the same calendar year, winning the last slalom of the 2018 season in Semmering and surpassing Marcel Hirscher. In the 2019 season, she became the first athlete, female or male, to win 17 World Cup races during a season, breaking the record of 14 wins that Vreni Schneider had held for 30 years. By winning the Gold in the Slalom at the 2019 World Championships, she became the first Alpine skier to win the world championship in the same discipline at four consecutive championships. At the Cortina 2021 World Championships, she became the first skier - male or female - to win gold medals at five straight Worlds. With her gold in giant slalom at Courchevel/Meribel 2023, she has now extended that record to six straight Worlds.
Olympic Results
Favored to win the slalom at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, Shiffrin led after the first run and nearly fell in the second, but held on for victory at Rosa Khutor. Three weeks shy of her 19th birthday, she became the youngest slalom champion in Olympic history.Three days earlier, she finished fifth in the giant slalom, held in the rain.
She competed in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, where she won the gold medal in the giant slalom and silver medal in the Combined.She placed 4th in the slalom despite being favored to win the gold medal in the event.
Media Appearances&Documentaries
Days after her first World Cup finals in 2013, Shiffrin was interviewed by David Letterman on the Late Show on March 19.
In 2014, Shiffrin was featured in a one-hour special on NBC television, How to Raise an Olympian, on February 5. Hosted by Meredith Vieira, it chronicled the journeys of seven US Olympians and featured interviews from parents and coaches along with home videos and photos from each athlete's childhood. The event was broadcast on television with live social-media components to enhance each segment.After Shiffrin's first gold medal win, she played "Catch Phrase" with Reese Witherspoon and Usher on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.On July 12, 2014, Shiffrin was a guest on the NPR radio show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, where she won the show's Not My Job game at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre.
On October 27, 2016, Shiffrin, speaking in German, presented the award for the best Austrian sportsman to Marcel Hirscher at a sports gala in Austria.In 2017, Shiffrin discussed her skiing roots and aptitude for napping on NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers.In 2018, Shiffrin was profiled on CBS News' 60 Minutes.
In the weeks after the February 2019 World Ski Championship, Amanda Ruggeri twice profiled Shiffrin in Deadspin,and she was featured in The Wall Street Journal.[In March 2019, after the conclusion of her record-setting World Cup season, she discussed handling anxiety on NBC's Today,addressed dealing with social media trolls on CNN,discussed pay equity on ABC's Good Morning America and the entertainment news show Access,and taught host Jimmy Fallon how to do the shuffle dance on NBC's Tonight Show.The New York Times profiled Shiffrin as "the face of American skiing,",a theme echoed in a Sports Illustrated profile and video where Shiffrin talked in detail about her history with Lindsey Vonn.[
Shiffrin has been the subject of long-form documentary videos. She is often featured in Outside's "In Search of Speed," including in 2015,,2017 and 2018.After covering Shiffrin's training regimen in 2017,Red Bull in 2018 produced the 48-minutes long documentary "Peak Season: The Determination of Mikaela Shiffrin."[In April 2019, NBC's Olympic channel devoted 25 hours of prime-time to feature 20 of Shiffrin's races in the 2018–2019 season;[her fanclub also released a compilation of highlights from her 2018–2019 season.
In October 2022, she was interviewed on Boomer Esiason's podcast.During the interview, reference was made to a piece written by Shiffrin about her father's passing in "The Players' Tribune".
In December 2022, Shiffrin began releasing documentary videos on her own Youtube channel, with themes and content of her choosing.
Shiffrin is the recipient of the 2023 Best Female Athlete ESPY Award.
