Mikaela Shiffrin’s wait for Olympic redemption goes on as she failed to make the podium in the first of her events at this year’s Games, the Alpine combined.
The American was the last skier to go in the slalom section of the two-leg team event, after world and newly crowned Olympic champion Breezy Johnson put her in pole position with a dominant downhill run.
Johnson was searching for a golden ‘double double’, having won both the downhill and combined world titles in 2025 – the latter alongside Shiffrin – and the Olympic downhill on Sunday.
Her brilliant leading time of 1:35.59 meant Shiffrin set off last of the slalom skiers, with the chance to sew up gold. But Shiffrin, the in-form slalom skier on the tour, was missing something of her usual spark on the Olympia delle Tofane piste and finished fourth, 0.31 seconds off the winning time.
There was a different American team on the podium, the ‘B team’ of Jacqueline Wiles and Paula Moltzan edging them for bronze by a mere eight-hundredths of a second.
Austria’s second team, Ariane Raedler and Katharine Huber, clinched gold with a time of 2:21.66, while Germany’s Emma Aicher sealed a second silver medal of the Games alongside Kira Weidle-Winkelmann, five-tenths of a second down on the Austrians.
22-year-old Aicher was four-hundredths of a second behind gold medallist Johnson in Sunday’s downhill, but opted to ski the slalom event instead today.
The decision paid off as she skied a whole second quicker than Shiffrin, and there was jubilation among the Austrians and Germans as Shiffrin’s time flashed up over the line, while the American was consoled by teammate Johnson.
It means Shiffrin’s wait for a first Olympic medal since Pyeongchang eight years ago continues, after a run of seven straight events without a podium finish.
She is the most successful World Cup skier of all time with a record 108 wins, and having won seven of eight World Cup events in the discipline this season – and with the crystal globe already secured – she was nominally the one to beat.
But the 30-year-old has never replicated that same dominance at the Olympics, enduring heartbreak in Beijing. She was the heavy favourite to win gold in at least three of the six events she competed in, but she crashed out early in the giant slalom and slalom – her best discipline – as well as the combined, and failed to win a medal at all.
“I just feel like a joke,” the devastated American said after her third DNF of that Games.
And there may have been an element of those old ghosts haunting her on Tuesday. She skied cleanly and there were no errors, major or minor, but it lacked the attack and finesse of Shiffrin at her best. She will have the chance to conquer those demons next Sunday in the giant slalom, with one more race to come in the slalom, her signature event.
