Culture
Mikaela Shiffrin is back and hunting for the next milestone as a new season begins
For Mikaela Shiffrin, the goalposts keep moving.
All that chatter about her setting the record for the most World Cup wins and becoming the greatest skier ever is so 2023. Now, with Shiffrin getting back to racing as the alpine season begins this weekend in Soelden, Austria, the talk has shifted to when she will get her 100th win, a rather silly number that few would have contemplated not long ago, before Shiffrin started collecting wins and crystal globes for season-long championships like they were Christmas ornaments.
She has 97 wins as the season begins, as well as three Olympic medals, two of them gold, five overall titles, 11 discipline titles, and 14 World Championship medals. That is all seriously silly.
To hear the 29-year-old Shiffrin talk about her career so far and what lies ahead is to understand how her work involves meeting a different set of standards than everyone else.
She will compete in slalom, giant slalom and super-G this season but has put downhill on the back burner for now. So of course she gets asked about why she isn’t also competing in the downhill.
She’s been at this since she was in her mid-teens, and yet the idea that she might be into the backside of her career remains hard to contemplate. She knows better than anyone how physically difficult it is to compete week after week so that she can get in the hunt for the season-long overall title and also peak in February for the Alpine World Championships in Austria, or next season, for the Olympics in Italy. Of course, she’s expected to do both, and win … obviously.
“It’s never obvious, it’s never easy,” Shiffrin said during a preseason conference call this week.
After six weeks sidelined by injury, Mikaela Shiffrin returned in March and won the slalom title at the 2024 World Cup season final. (Christophe Pallot / Agence Zoom / Getty Images)
Shiffrin had a revelatory moment this summer at the Paris Olympics. Her seats in the Olympic stadium for the 400-meter hurdles happened to be right next to those occupied by the family of Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, who is basically the Mikaela Shiffrin of her sport, or vice-versa, if you are track person rather than a skiing person.
Everyone in the Shiffrin camp was sure McLaughlin-Levrone would win — by a lot. She was as close to a guarantee as there was in Paris.
And yet, McLaughlin-Levrone’s family was on pins and needles.
They knew how hard this was, how anything could happen until she was over the final hurdle and floating to the finish. Shiffrin knows that, too. She and her team have been dealing with that every week for nearly a decade, along with all the stressors of being one of the more famous athletes in the world.
Now, strange as it may seem, Shiffrin will begin to find some calm where others might not necessarily think she might. After months of getting pulled in every direction, of balancing summer ski camps in South America and training blocks with sponsor obligations with promotional opportunities, and philanthropy, the racing begins. Once more, she can laser focus on dancing through the gates on a snow-covered mountain.
“It’s hard, it’s stressful, but it’s also peaceful, and that’s what I love about it,” she said.
She knows she is on the backside of her career but has no definite plans for how much longer after the 2026 Olympics she will compete.
After an injury-riddled season last year — somehow she still won the World Cup slalom title — Shiffrin is hoping for a smoother ride this year.
Shiffrin sprained the MCL and tibiofibular ligament in her knee in January. The injuries sidelined her for six weeks. She won two more races when she returned, easing doubts that still plague her whenever she is hurt or doesn’t ski for a chunk of time and it feels like the ski world is moving on without her.
“You feel pain or weakness and you’re like, ‘I don’t think I can do that,’ she said. ‘Logically I know I have done that, but I don’t think I can do it again.”
Even during a healthy season, she can experience those doubts when she doesn’t ski one discipline for a couple weeks and then has to return to it.
“It’s never obvious, it’s never easy,” Mikaela Shiffrin says of her expectations. The new alpine season begins this weekend in Austria. (Jonas Ericsson / Agence Zoom / Getty Images)
Will she be able to move her feet quickly enough to get around the tight slalom gates, she wonders?
It probably all sounds a bit silly to her competitors. Even if she isn’t competing in downhill for now — no word yet on her plans for the 2026 Olympics — Shiffrin is as good an all-around skier as there is. She has won 60 slalom races, 22 giant slalom, five super-G and four downhill.
To some extent, her offseason has been an exercise in easing those doubts as this opening weekend in Soelden approaches. Last summer she was plagued with tough luck with weather, which limited her time on the snow. Then she packed her racing schedule and began to feel like she was running on fumes. Then came the crash and the injury.
When this offseason started, she sat down with her mother, Eileen, who is her longest-serving coach, and tried to map out a plan so she could feel truly prepared at the start of the season. They came up with a mix of short camps and indoor skiing and a trip to South America to make sure she got the necessary time on the snow.
Every day, she would push herself slightly further. Even for the best skiers in the world, the sport is an exercise in risk tolerance. How fast can your mind allow your body to take a turn? How far will it allow you to fly on a jump?
“Every day, I stretch the rubber band a little bit,” Shiffrin said.
In Soelden this weekend, she plans to stretch it as far as she has in a long while, and even, maybe, find some peace as she does it.
(Top photo of Mikaela Shiffrin celebrating her slalom title at the 2024 World Cup season final in Austria in March: Franz Kirchmayr / SEPA.Media / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
-
Boston, MA3 minutes agoStormy Saturday, slightly sunnier Sunday – Boston News, Weather, Sports | WHDH 7News
-
Denver, CO8 minutes agoStorm threat for northeastern Colorado Saturday; sunny and warmer Sunday
-
Seattle, WA15 minutes agoWEST SEATTLE SATURDAY: 33 options!
-
San Diego, CA18 minutes agoLetters: Stop taxpayer funds for short-term rental trash
-
Milwaukee, WI23 minutes ago5 Milwaukee Tool Combos That Come With Forge Batteries – SlashGear
-
Atlanta, GA30 minutes agoMichael Penix Jr. is betting his NFL future to prove he’s Atlanta’s franchise QB
-
Minneapolis, MN33 minutes agoChicago-to-Minneapolis United Airlines flight diverted after attempted cockpit breach
-
Indianapolis, IN38 minutes agoCircle City Orchestra wraps up season with ‘Sound Bites’ fundraiser
