By THE NEW YORK TIMES
The U.S. skier has transformed herself into a gold medal contender in all the Alpine events.
Mikaela Shiffrin Is Winning a Lot of Slalom Races. But That’s Not Good Enough.
By The New York Times Feb. 8, 2018
See these quick, technical slalom turns? No one in the world does this better or is winning more slalom races.
But now Shiffrin wants to master this: the downhill,
racing down an icy mountain at 80 m.p.h.
Since I was a little girl, I was
watching Bode Miller compete,
and winning in every discipline.
That’s what it means to
be the best in the world.
Not just winning
slaloms or one event,
but being able to win, to
really compete, in every event.
It’s no surprise that it’s hard to be great at everything. Any time spent improving her downhill can eat away at her slalom dominance.
“It’s a case of stealing from Peter to pay Paul,” said Eileen Shiffrin, her mother and coach.
You have slalom skiers that
are specializing in slalom
and to be competitive with them,
you need a lot of training.
And G.S., the same thing.
There’s a lot of G.S. specialists.
And then downhill and super-G —
that’s a whole other set of
girls that are, obviously,
exceptional.
Racing all five
disciplines, there’s
very few people that have
actually been able to do it.
Ski races exist along a spectrum of speed and length.
Slalom is the shortest and slowest.
Downhill is the longest and fastest.
Most ski racers do well on one side of this chart or the other.
Vonn’s victories have come mostly in the speed events: downhill and super‑G.
Shiffrin excels at the shorter, technical events: slalom and giant slalom.
The fifth event is Alpine combined: one run of downhill plus one run of slalom. (Shiffrin has her eyes on gold in that one.)
Slalom is agility. Constant turning. Punching away gates every half a second.
Downhill is momentum. Less technique. More aerodynamics. Tough on the legs. Tough on the nerves.
When I ski, I feel some kind
of a rhythm with every course.
Slalom, it’s a much faster
tempo between turns.
So it’s kind of like a
really upbeat sort of a song,
like today’s hits, you know?
And then oddly
enough downhill, it’s
almost like some sort
of classical symphony.
So that’s been an
interesting transition.
Slalom turns are a constant rat‑a‑tat shifting hard from one ski edge to another.
Downhill turns are the opposite. Long arcs. Patience. Soft on her edges. Letting the skis glide.
Shiffrin’s torso stays mostly upright in slalom.
She looks as if she’s skiing only from the waist down.
She needs agile muscles for this.
Those muscle groups light up, turn after turn, millisecond after millisecond.
In downhill those same muscles are fighting forces pushing down on her. And those forces are many times her body weight. Here, she doesn’t need agility. She needs power.
Try this tuck position. Put your legs at 90 degrees. Stack three friends on your back, and hold that for two minutes.
It’s a constant burning, her legs acting as shock absorbers over the varied terrain. This makes her physical training a tricky balance.
But now adding two more
events, I have basically twice
as much training that I need to
do and half the amount of time
to do it all.
How powerful can she make her legs for downhill without losing the agility she needs for slalom? How many squats are too many?
Spend too much time doing squats for the downhill and not enough on agility, and she risks her slalom dominance. That’s not the only risk she’s taking.
Downhill is dangerous.
Skiing down an icy mountain
at 80 miles an hour,
if you catch an edge,
before you even can blink,
you’re in the fences on
the side of the hill.
And normally,
crashing that fast,
you’re going to get injured.
And another thing to worry about in downhill? These jumps.
To survive the jumps, she has to minimize the risk.
Remember that tuck? She uses a version of it here.
At takeoff, she pushes her hands down and pulls her knees up.
That makes the jump shorter, faster and safer.
So far, Shiffrin has reason to hope. In the fourth downhill of her career in December, she won. And she continues to dominate in slalom.
She’s now a gold medal contender in all the Alpine events in Pyeongchang. Last month, Bode Miller called her the greatest ski racer he had ever seen.
My biggest dream in ski racing
when I was, you know, 5 years old
was that I wanted to
win the overall title,
so it’s just me staying true
to my dream as a little girl.
Produced by Bill Pennington, Larry Buchanan, Meg Felling, Alexandra Garcia, Grant Gold, Mika Gröndahl, Dane Henry, Ben Laffin, Matt Ruby, Bedel Saget, Joe Ward and Margaret Cheatham Williams.
Additional work by Francis Agyapong and Eli Epstein.
Sources Eileen Shiffrin, Mike Day, Jeff Lackie and Troy Taylor.
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