By Mikaela Shiffrin
Last season, she broke Lindsey Vonn’s women’s record of 82 World Cup wins, then went on to speed past Ingemar Stenmark’s record 86, which had stood for 34 years. Shiffrin makes it look easy—but she’s also the first to admit that it’s anything but. She has opened up about grieving the sudden loss of her father, Jeff, before a disappointing performance at the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games, the pressure of expectations, and facing her fear of failure. She shared about all of that, and more, with The B—and we think her honesty makes her even more inspiring.
On Her Roots in the Berkshires
My entire life, I’ve felt like the Berkshires was one of my happy places. Growing up, we would visit my Nana and Papa, and the whole family would come because my mom, her sisters, and her brother all grew up in Lanesborough. So, throughout my life, it was always the reunion spot. We’d often go at Thanksgiving or during the summer, and everybody would plan their trip around visiting Nana and Papa—all the cousins would come.
I have so many incredible memories, and I really love to come back here. I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world, especially in the summertime and fall when the leaves start to change. We would go to Williams football games and for hikes. There’s so many amazing things about the area, including the skiing—all these smaller ski resorts as well as Jiminy and Bousquet—I do truly love it here.
Mikaela and her Nana, Polly Condron, at her home in Lanesborough; Polly, who passed away in 2019, was one of Mikaela’s biggest fans. Photo courtesy of Eileen Shiffrin.
On the Power of Sports
One of the most important and most beautiful things that sports brings into our lives is the development of work ethic and discipline. Which is funny, because sometimes people don’t love to hear about working really hard and being really disciplined and motivated. Sometimes people just want to talk about having fun.
Sports is a really unique thing because it combines fun with discipline—with work ethic, with drive and motivation—as well as the social aspect of being around your friends. It helps feed your competitive side, but hopefully also guides you in a way that can be supportive of your teammates or even your competitors at times.
There’s nothing else in the world that combines all of those different qualities and life skills into one thing that you can really enjoy. For the young kids out there, maybe you want to pursue sports and get to a professional level, or you want to do it in college or high school. Maybe you haven’t started until after college, when you’re well into your professional career, and you’re just starting to think of joining a soccer league or starting master ski racing. There’s literally no limit and I absolutely love that about sports. It’s never too late and it’s always worth trying, because it’s healthy for your body, for your mind. It’s such a great way to exercise and to meet people and develop friends for life.
On Working Out
My workout routine is a combination of things. I do strength sessions three to four times a week, and then I’ll do cardio and interval training and a lot of core training. I do Pilates often, as well, to help my core and keep my back in good shape. I play quite a lot of tennis, so Bousquet Sport is amazing because there are great tennis courts there.
One of my favorite—and also least favorite—exercises is pull-ups. When I was younger, I couldn’t do a single pull-up. So I made it my life’s mission to get strong enough that I could do them. And now I can. It’s still one of my least favorite things to do, but I always feel so accomplished when I can do a few.
Photo: Mike Dawson – Stifel U.S. Ski Team
Happy Campers
This past summer, Eileen and Mikaela visited Pittsfield’s Camp Arrow Wood (CAW), where Mikaela was having a lodge dedicated to her. It was a special experience for the Shiffrins and the campers. The kids gathered around the flagpole at the edge of Richmond Pond, and Mikaela shared with them what it’s like for people to put so much pressure on her and almost want to see her fail. She and Eileen also answered questions—lots of questions! Camp Arrow Wood has an emphasis on sports, so the young athletes were eager to take in as much as they could.
“We feel like the area—and specifically Camp Arrow Wood, with its gorgeous location in the woods on Richmond Pond, and its updated buildings and sports arenas—is a hidden gem and a magical place where all youth would be lucky to spend time,” said Eileen. “Camp Arrow Wood represents the essence of our family‘s values—some sport, some culture, living the outdoor life, competition with compassion, and learning to be good humans, partially through experiencing the environment so unique to Berkshire life. Becoming an ambassador for CAW seemed like a very natural course given Mikaela‘s appreciation for the area and the core values of CAW, so having a lodge named for her is meaningful to her.”
By Megan Haley: Mikaela took a moment on the porch of the lodge named for her. By Quentin Gittens: Her boyfriend, Norwegian Olympic medalist and World Cup Alpine ski racer Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, joined her in the Berkshires and for the visit at Camp Arrow Wood; here they are with Mill Town’s Dave Mixer and a camper. Mikaela lingered with the kids, taking selfies and signing autographs.
On Facing Challenges
I’ve learned that everybody faces challenges and struggles, and everybody on some level deals with anxiety. There’s always something we care about enough that the fear of not doing it well enough or having people judge us or not improving or excelling at it—whatever it might be—brings on some level of anxiety. That’s something that everybody can relate to.
For a long time in my career, a couple years at least, I felt like I was alone in feeling nervous and anxious and fearing what the media would say, even what my friends might say. Or disappointing family or feeling like the expectations were so high that I just couldn’t possibly reach them.
And there was a period of time where I felt like, even if I won races, I was still destined to fail. It was a really strange place to be when I was 20, 22, 24 years old, just getting to this point in life where most of my peers are celebrating, turning 21, and life is really just beginning and the world feels like your oyster. I was at a point where I felt destined to fail in this sport because I’ve had such great success.
On the one hand, that’s amazing. On the other hand, I’m just setting myself up to literally disappoint people from here on out because I can’t possibly meet these expectations that people have set. I didn’t know how to keep getting better.
It was a really confusing and complicated thing to go through, mentally and emotionally. Over time I realized that life is not a linear climb. If you feel like you’ve reached the top of a mountain, it doesn’t mean it’s all downhill from there for the rest of your life. It just means you reached that summit and it might be downhill for a bit, and then you’ll climb again.
You’ll reach different summits, you’ll figure out other things you love to do, or you’ll stick with the same thing, and it’s just going to be peaks and valleys. You’ll get to experience the joy of it more than once in your life. Even in your lowest moments, you can always look forward to things picking back up as long as you’re passionate about it and you’re willing to work to improve.
At that time I thought it was going to be people endlessly picking me apart for not exceeding their expectations. And then, over the next few years, I realized that people reset their expectations—that maybe I wasn’t going to win every race by two seconds, but I might still be a contender to win races. The competition was picking up again. And people just sort of roll with the punches in life.
When you think, “the expectations are too high and you’re never going to meet them, so why is it worth trying?” you’ll find that it might be in a couple weeks, it might be in a couple months, it might be in a couple years, but people adjust—and you adjust. As humans, we don’t love to experience change, but we are born to adjust and adapt to our environment.
That’s something that I really hold onto now. Because every time I have a great season, I wonder: “Am I setting the expectations too high?” For instance, this season, after getting 88 wins and resetting this all-time record, now I’m a little bit fearful that people are going to be thinking I’ll break 100 this year. I want to scream from the rooftop: “Could everybody just slow down and reset your expectations because this is just too much pressure!”
But then I realize they’ll get there on their own time and, in a way, it doesn’t matter as long as I’m enjoying it.
Photos: Mike Dawson – Stifel U.S. Ski Team. Mikaela won the ESPY for Best Athlete in Women’s Sports in July 2023.
On Success and Failure
We will fail in life and we’ll succeed in life. Most of the time, the reason we succeed is because we’ve learned from failures. And the reason we appreciate succeeding is because we’ve failed before. And that makes the success sweeter.
No matter what people say about you, and no matter how many times you fail, you can’t truly be a failure in life. There’s literally nobody out there who is.
I’ve been a failure at moments, and those moments have inspired me to try harder or be kinder. It’s not just at the Olympics, not winning a medal in Beijing. It’s small moments, in ways that I react in situations with family and people I love. It’s simply not feeling motivated enough to do the work that I have to do, and in that moment I feel like I’ve failed.
All of those moments, whether they’re big or small, public or private, they’re really important in order to help you figure out what your next steps are to do what you really want to do. And that thinking and that mindset automatically means you could never be a true failure.
