Mikaela Shiffrin extended her Olympic slump with a fourth-place finish in the new team combined event at the Milan Cortina Games on Tuesday after partner Breezy Johnson led the opening downhill leg.
Shiffrin, the most successful World Cup racer of all time with a record 108 victories — 71 of them in slalom, also a record — has now gone seven straight Olympic races without a medal.
After taking two golds and a silver from her first two Olympics, Shiffrin didn’t win a medal in any of her six races at the Beijing Games four years ago.
“No tricks here at all,” Shiffrin was told over team radio before her run on a course set by an Austrian coach. “Actually it’s nothing to report. You got it.”
But Shiffrin lost time to the leaders at every checkpoint and crossed 0.31 seconds behind — missing a medal by finishing 0.06 behind the other American team of Jaqueline Wiles and Paula Moltzan, who took bronze. In the finish area, Johnson — who was coming off a gold in the individual downhill — embraced Shiffrin, while the podium finishers began celebrating.
Shiffrin and Johnson are childhood friends and Johnson had said after her downhill run, “I already have my gold medal. I hope that she has fun and does her best. But if anything happens I’m not going to be like, ‘Oh you ruined anything.’”
Ariane Raedler and Katharina Huber of Austria won gold.
The team combined consists of one racer competing in a downhill run and another in a slalom run, with the times from the two added together to determine the results.
Shiffrin still has her individual events of giant slalom and slalom to come.
In Beijing, Shiffrin didn't finish three of her six races and her best individual result was ninth in super-G. She has narrowed her focus for the Milan Cortina Games and is competing in only three events.
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AP National Writer Will Graves contributed to this report.
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AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
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