BEIJING — Mikaela Shiffrin trudged to the left side of the slalom course, yards from the scene of her latest disappointment, and collapsed. At the top of the mountain, at the bottom of her confidence, she held her head in her hands, and she thought about betrayal.
That walk took her longer than her Olympic races.
Two days ago, the world’s greatest active skier flubbed a gate 11 seconds into her first run of the giant slalom and skied off the course. On Wednesday, she made it not quite five seconds into the first run of the slalom before she took a wide turn into the fourth gate, could not hold her line after the fifth and skied off the course again. It was the first time she failed to finish two consecutive technical races on the senior level since 2011, when she was 16. A second straight did-not-finish was an unfathomable result, one of the most shocking sequences in Olympics history.
