Mikaela Shiffrin will travel home empty-handed from the Beijing Winter Games after the United States missed the podium by 0.42 seconds in the mixed team parallel on Sunday afternoon.
The 26-year-old American star, the headline attraction of a US team including River Radamus, Paula Moltzan and Tommy Ford, came tantalizingly close to a redemptive bronze after defeating a Slovakia team without star Petra Vlhova in their opening tie before upsetting Italy to reach the medal round.
But the Americans were denied a shot at gold by Germany in the semi-finals, then bowed to Norway in a bronze-medal match-up on a tie-breaker to finish in fourth place and out of the medals. Top-seeded Austria won the gold in the mixed-gender team event, which debuted on the Olympic programme four years ago in Pyeongchang, edging a German team who settled for silver.
The knockout competition represented Shiffrin’s last chance at a medal after she finished no better than ninth in five individual races while failing to cross the finish line entirely in three of them, an outcome that would have been unthinkable a fortnight ago when the three-time overall World Cup champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist arrived with designs on Janica Kostelic’s women’s record of four medals at a single Winter Games.
“I am not disappointed,” Shiffrin said. “I have had a lot of disappointing moments at these Games. Today is not one of them – today is my favourite memory.
“This was the best possible way that I could imagine ending the Games, skiing with such strong teammates.”
The last alpine skiing event of the Beijing Games finally went off on Sunday morning, having been postponed for a day because of high winds, on the Ice River course that has been a house of horrors for Shiffrin at these Olympics. She entered Sunday’s curtain-dropper having not made it to the bottom of the course in the slalom, the giant slalom and the slalom portion of the alpine combined, skiing out three times in the technical races that are the foundation of her dominance.
The Americans were seeded sixth in the bracket-style competition where each round consists of two men and two women going head to head on adjacent courses in a series of four heats. The team with the majority of wins in each matchup advances to the next round while 2-all deadlocks are decided by the lower combined time of each team’s fastest man and fastest woman.
The course is shorter – most of Sunday’s runs lasted about 25 seconds – and even the competitors themselves admit the stakes are considerably lower. But there’s no question that a medal could have offered some consolation for Shiffrin amid the lowest period of a professional life defined by dizzying highs.
Shiffrin completed four clean runs down the abbreviated giant slalom course on another morning of high winds and sub-zero temperatures on the south side of Xiaohaituo Mountain. But after winning her opening heat from the leadoff position to help the United States advance past Slovakia, she was placed on the slower red course for the final three matchups and lost each time.
The full-day postponement due to Saturday’s roughly 65kph (40mph) gusts at the top of the course forced Shiffrin to alter her travel plans, a decision that she did not make lightly ahead of next week’s World Cup races in Crans Montana, Switzerland.
But the American said the opportunity to cap an Olympic experience that hasn’t always been pleasant alongside her team-mates was worth the sacrifice.
“Twenty-four hours makes a really big difference when I think about my individual goals, my personal goals, for the rest of the season,” said Shiffrin, who narrowly leads Vlhova atop the leaderboard in pursuit of her fourth overall World Cup crystal globe. “There was absolutely some thought that the 24 hours makes a difference to be still pushing and using that energy. I decided to stay because I wanted to compete with my teammates. I couldn’t possibly imagine leaving. There’s been a lot of points in my career where I had to put my individual interests first in order to have the success, accomplish the goals.”
She added: “Today it was just important for us to be able to compete together. And they have been supportive of me this entire Games – just unbelievable. They just deserve to know how much I love them and how much I wanted to just try to help and have the potential to win a medal today.”
Once a teenage prodigy who became the youngest Olympic slalom champion in history at the Sochi Games, Shiffrin has since blossomed from a specialist into the world’s best all-around skier, branching out into the speed events with success and becoming the only skier, male or female, to win World Cup races in all six disciplines.
Her three Olympic medals include gold in slalom in 2014 and in giant slalom in 2018, while her 73 career wins in World Cup races are third-most on the all-time leaderboard, trailing only Swedish great Ingemar Stenmark (86) and longtime US team-mate Lindsey Vonn (82).
The US completed the alpine skiing programme in Beijing with only one medal out of a possible 30 in individual events: Ryan Cochran-Siegle’s surprise silver in the super-G. That matched the country’s lowest overall haul at an Olympics since 1998, when Picabo Street’s famous super-G gold in Nagano represented their only medal.
