Ski racer Mikaela Shiffrin already owns two Olympic gold medals and seven world championship titles, more wins than any alpine skier in history, an ESPY for best athlete in women’s sports, and eight reindeer (yes, actual reindeer more on that in a bit).
On February 23, the 29-year-old further cemented her spot in history by reaching a milestone few people herself included believed to be possible, notching her 100th career victory in the FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, the sport’s top international circuit, in Sestriere, Italy. In the slalom, she finished 0.61 seconds ahead of a Croatian Zrinka Ljutic to earn the top spot on the podium, while her US teammate Paula Moltzan nabbed third.
The triumphant moment came less than three months after a scary crash that threatened her season—and her health. After Shiffrin notched her 99th win in Gurgl, Austria, all eyes were on her as she headed into the Stifel Killington Cup in Vermont on November 30. And when she led after the first run of the giant slalom, hopes were high that she’d hit the 100-win mark on what was essentially home snow. (She’d trained for years at the nearby Burke Mountain Academy.)
But about a minute and 40 seconds into her second run, one of her skis caught and she fell, crashing into two gates before hitting the protective fencing. Somewhere during the tumble, something—she thinks it was her ski pole—stabbed her in the oblique, a muscle along the side of her torso. (Her YouTube video about the accident was titled “I’ve Been Impaled.”)
The crash itself was terrifying, and recovery was “anything but straightforward or easy,” Shiffrin tells SELF. On December 12, she had an unplanned surgery to drain a deep portion of the seven-centimeter-deep wound. Though that required some extra downtime for healing, the pace of her recovery picked up afterward. She announced her return to the slopes on January 23 and began racing soon after. Shiffrin’s win in Sestriere was her second World Cup slalom race back after the crash in November. She developed PTSD after Killington and had only returned to the giant slalom, the event where she crashed, this weekend, sitting it out at the World Championships earlier this month. She finished 25th in that race, just the day before winning the slalom for her 100th World Cup victory.
In conjunction with her achievement, Shiffrin will be partnering with an organization called Share Winter Foundation—which aims to bring a broader, more diverse community to the slopes—to raise $100,000 for learn-to-ski-and-snowboard programs for youth who otherwise would not have access to these sports. Earlier in the season and again before returning to race after her injury, SELF caught up with Shiffrin to hear more about her speedy return, what the milestone means (both for her and the next generation of athletes), how she handles the pressure that comes with it, the importance of athletes’ mental health, and what she’d tell her younger self about reaching her dreams. Here’s what she had to say.
Mikaela Shiffrin: In the past, I have shied away from the numbers questions. The records were never something I set out to achieve. My goal was to be one of the greatest ski racers in the world—not one of the greatest ski racers of all time, just at any given moment in time. When I was a little girl, I dreamt about winning the overall globe—the overall World Cup season title—as well as the individual slalom and giant slalom globes [two of the individual disciplines that make up the World Cup]. Flash forward to where we are now, and this is far beyond anything I had ever imagined for my career. I feel like nobody should have ever been in a position to be here in the sport, and I don’t know why I am. I mean, I get it—hard work, a great team around me, all the tangible pieces that have built up to this moment. But if you think about it as a deeper, more philosophical question of, “Why me?” I couldn’t tell you. There’s a lot to be grateful for in this moment, and that’s what I’m feeling. Did you even think it was possible at this point after your injury?
Coming back this season at all is a win, and then coming back so soon is, in and of itself, another physical and mental barrier overcome. To think about all the hype around my 100th victory before I crashed—I felt so far away from that world and that space when I returned. Where I was with my team, we had to be protective of our space. The victory count was just so off our radar. Still, we didn’t count anything out. The injury gave me an opportunity to work on deficiencies with my core that I probably needed to work on, but we were always in high-level competition and there was never time to go back to rudimentary basics. What I’m most excited about now is the opportunity to show that over time—the rest of the season and into next season, which is a big year for many reasons—I can come back even stronger. What was going through your mind right after the crash? And how did your emotions about it all shift as your recovery progressed—especially when you had surgery and had to slow down a little bit? It’s been a whirlwind of emotions. Any athlete who gets injured would always choose to be in the position to be able to return in the same season, so I feel really lucky. When I walked in my hotel room in Courchevel [the week of my first race back], I just started crying, looking back on the [previous] eight weeks and reflecting.
That was one of the most traumatic crashes I’ve had. I’ve never felt that kind of pain in my life. It brought a whole new level of perspective and understanding of how fragile our bodies are. On the one hand, we’re very strong; on the other hand, small mistakes can happen, and we’re skiing at such speeds and with such force that the impact can be huge. We crash in ski racing. It happens all the time. But this was a seven-centimeter-deep puncture wound that nearly broke through my colon. And that was like, ‘Holy crap. This is just scary.’ The first two weeks were insane. I had a wound vac [a device that suctions out fluids and debris to help a wound heal], and then we were packing the wound. After surgery, I had a drainage tube. These are not things we deal with in ski racing. This is what war vets experience—this is for stab wounds, gunshot wounds. If I think too much about it, I kind of get shivers. It’s just a whirlwind of emotions, how lucky I was in the face of being a little bit unlucky. You came back far sooner than even you might have originally anticipated. What were some of the most important things you did during rehab, physically and mentally, that got you back so quickly?
I’ve spent a lot of time in the gym, a lot of time with my physical therapist, doing very fundamental work of core strength—trying to reactivate my core, once I could make that connection with the muscle at all. The puncture wound acts like a torn muscle, because whatever punctured me severed the muscle. I could feel there was no connection between the muscle fibers in a section of my obliques. For two weeks straight, I was basically leaning—if I sat straight, or if I stood straight, my right side would lose connection and it was very painful. After three weeks, they had to open it up further, so that created more damage. At that point in time, I could not imagine making a ski turn, with all the lateral forces. It was like, “This doesn’t feel like I’m ever gonna be able to get back. I can’t get out of bed.” But I trusted what the medical team around me was working on. My physical therapist created a road map based on the research she was doing. She treated it like a tear, severe muscle trauma. It was a very methodical, step-by-step process. There was also an important balance between pushing to my limit each step of the way, but not pushing over the limit. More is not better with this case, because it could create other injuries or a more chronic injury of this muscle. We’ve been strategic with working the rest of my body when I wasn’t able to activate my obliques, then adding core [exercises] as my pain started getting better. It was somehow both patient and always at the limit, every step of the way. That’s a tough balance to strike, but being here now, I think we did it quite well.
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