OLYMPICS Mikaela Shiffrin Learned to Ski in Vail. She Learned to Race in Vermont. The conditions were awful. Which made them ideal. How the ice of the Northeast helped Shiffrin become the best technical skier in the world.
By Ben Cohen Updated Feb. 12, 2018 7:20 a.m. ET PYEONGCHANG, South Korea Mikaela Shiffrin was only a teenager when she faced a decision that would change her life forever. She had to choose where she wanted to ski. And her choices were the two places she called home: Vail and Vermont. Shiffrin was born in Colorado, moved to New Hampshire and trained in Vermont before moving back in middle school to what may be the best place on the planet for a skier. And the person who today may be the best skier on the planet didn t want to be there. Her parents knew she needed to get back to the Northeast. She enrolled at the Burke Mountain Academy, a boarding school in Vermont for ski racers, where the snow was so bad that it was basically ice. But what s miserable for most skiers was magical for Shiffrin. This is where she became the most dominant skier alive. It s perfect conditions, said Bug Pech, Shiffrin s high-school roommate, because it s horrible conditions. That contradiction is one reason she may leave Pyeongchang considered the greatest of all-time in her sport. The first of Shiffrin s potential five races here, on Wednesday the beginning of what could be an epic run the likes of which the Winter Olympics have never seen happens to be her best event. Shiffrin has won every world-championship slalom race since 2013. She won the Olympic slalom race in 2014 for her first gold medal. She won so many slalom events last season that she won her sport s overall World Cup title. She wins at such an extraordinary rate that it only makes sense there s an unusual explanation for how she skis: where she skied.
The Art of the Millisecond You grow up in the East, and you know how to ski on ice, said Erik Schlopy, a Burke alumnus who skied in three Olympics. There s no better training ground than Vermont because it s icy. Anyone who has skied both sides of the United States would say the mountains out West are bigger and better in almost every way. The powder in destination resorts like Vail is the soft, pillowy stuff of skiing paradise. But for ski racers, that s a problem. They want the consistency of hard snow, and they ll go anywhere to feel the power of their sharp turns.
Shiffrin didn t have to go very far. The conditions in Vermont were almost identical to the conditions she would one day encounter across Europe. The World Cup runs are pure ice, Schlopy said. It s basically a slab of marble that s a mile long. The idea is to reward technical precision, and no skier is as technically precise as Shiffrin, in part because she s familiar with snow that s injected with water to feel less like snow. That happens naturally in the East, said Griffin Brown, her classmate at Burke.
It s almost impossible to say whether Shiffrin is more the product of nature or nurture because the truth is that she s both. The daughter of ski racers, Shiffrin was born in Colorado, where children click into skis as soon as they can walk, and her family moved to New Hampshire when she was eight. She soon embraced the benefits of being in the Northeast. Shiffrin began whizzing down the small local hill, and once she enrolled at Burke Mountain Academy in eighth grade, she used its short course and quick lift to get lots and lots and lots of practice. Her advantage was the efficiency of the training, said Kirk Dwyer, her youth coach at Burke. Even something as seemingly meaningless as her means of transportation was essential to Shiffrin s development. She didn t ride the sort of high-speed lifts that chauffeur recreational skiers atop resort destinations. Shiffrin was towed uphill by an old Poma bar. It picked her up at the bottom of the course and deposited her right back at the top. There was no wasted time or energy, and her feet never left the snow. She also made a habit of sneaking in extra runs. Her five extra runs every day turned into hundreds of extra runs every season and thousands of extra runs over the course of her childhood. But how did she get all those extra runs? By getting dressed faster than any of her Burke classmates. That s right: Mikaela Shiffrin was even the fastest at getting dressed. There was an unspoken competition to be first in line, Brown said. She was always first in line. Always, Pech said.
Mikaela Shiffrin skis a World Cup race in Killington, Vt., last year. PHOTO: JOEL MARKLUND/ZUMA PRESS Her obsession demanded maniacal discipline. Shiffrin s coaches tracked her gates per day and measured her time per gate to World Cup standards. She practiced more than she competed. She napped with a purpose. She studied film instead of watching movies, and she shrugged at fresh dumps of snow instead of shredding it. I m not really that into powder, Shiffrin said. She was more into drills. The most boring, boring drills, Pech said. One of her favorite boring, boring drills was simply traversing the mountain. You re literally just going across the hill, Pech said. You re not even making a turn. Yet nobody at Burke was surprised when Shiffrin would ditch powder days to keep practicing. It was odd, but it was not an oddity for her, Pech said. She knew exactly what she had to do to be at her prime. And she did that. As a 13-year-old! That s what was unusual. She had the work ethic of Tom Brady when she was 13.
It soon became clear to people outside Vermont what an outlier Shiffrin was. She made her World Cup debut at 15, won her first race at 17 and struck Olympic gold at 18. She s now 22 and seems to be peaking. I can t wait to get to race, Shiffrin said this week. I really like the conditions. She wouldn t have come to Pyeongchang where she could win three and maybe even an unprecedented four gold medals more than a week in advance if she didn t. She can train anywhere she wants. She s on the road so much, in fact, that it doesn t matter where Shiffrin calls home. Which is why she no longer lives in Vermont. Shiffrin now lives near Vail. Shiffrin is aiming for her second consecutive Olympic gold medal in slalom. PHOTO: VASSIL DONEV/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY