Opinion: Mikaela Shiffrin finds a way through grief after father’s sudden death

The tears came even before Mikaela Shiffrin won her first race this past season.

She always takes a nap or meditates between runs and, when she awoke that December day in Courchevel, France, she found herself crying because she could feel what was coming and she knew the flood of emotions it would bring.

It wasn’t that it would be her first win in almost a year. Or that it would come after a back injury she feared would threaten her career. Or that it would be in the midst of a pandemic that had upended her and everyone else’s worlds.

The win, in giant slalom, would be her first victory since the unexpected February 2020 death of her father, Jeff, whose low-key presence loomed large throughout every aspect of the two-time Olympic champion’s life.

“This is going to be first the race I win without him saying anything. Without being able to call him,” Shiffrin said recently, recalling her thinking that day. “This is the start of the rest of my ski career without one of the biggest pieces of my ski career.

“Sometimes I think I’m probably going to win this race, and I don’t. For whatever reason, I was thinking, ‘This is going to happen today and it’s probably going to be really sad,’” she added. “And it was really sad. But you have to take those steps.

“There’s a bunch of new firsts,” she said, “and you either do it or you don’t.”

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