How Mikaela Shiffrin got back together for another shot at Olympic success

Last November, Eileen Shiffrin, the mother of the greatest skier in history, looked up at the giant slalom hill in Killington, Vermont, as her daughter, Mikaela, crashed through a gate, plummeted across the snow and ice, and slid into the safety net amid a stand of pine trees.

“She didn’t seem like she was moving,” Eileen, a former competitive skier who has been coaching Mikaela since she was a child, remembered in a recent interview. “The way she fell, she may have had a neck or back damage. “I was trying to remain calm.”

Shiffrin’s head coach, Karin Harjo, stood on the edge of the slope, roughly 150 feet below where Mikaela crashed, documenting the run for coaching and posterity. If all went according to plan, Shiffrin would win her remarkable and hitherto unimaginable 100th World Cup on home snow, in the state where she had refined her craft since infancy.

Then Shiffrin struck the snow. Harjo dropped her camera and ran up the mountain. Shiffrin was laying at the feet of a Swiss coach, who had been watching the final significant run of the day from that location. A ski patroller was already there. The first medic arrived as Harjo did.

Harjo, who lives in Washington state, has been coaching professional skiers for over a decade. She has witnessed catastrophic crashes and cared for skiers who had shattered bones twisted in the wrong direction.

Shiffrin could still feel her limbs. Her neck and spine appeared to be fine. But she was in excruciating pain in her belly and freezing, already shivering in that paper-thin racing suit. In that moment, no one understood why every breath and movement ached so much.

Shiffrin crashes in the World Cup giant slalom race in Killington, Vt. (Robert Bukaty / AP Photo)

“When you have a broken leg, you can see that it’s deformed, so it makes sense in your mind,” Harjo told me lately. “But when somebody is laying on the ground in that kind of pain and there’s not a deformity, there’s no extreme blood coming out from anywhere, then you really are concerned because there’s something happening inside that you can’t see.”

Shiffrin’s brain is always analysing, wondering, and learning. She had gone beyond thought. This was not like the previous season’s crash at Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, when she suffered a knee injury that sidelined her for six weeks. All she could do was feel the pain in her abdomen and the cold air. Harjo collected jackets to wrap around her.

“It was just killing me, and it was cold,” Shiffrin said during an interview in New York in April, as she ate shoestring fries at the end of another unusually long season.

The medics didn’t discover out what was causing all of the anguish until they placed the still-shivering Shiffrin into an ambulance and cut up her suit while driving to the hospital. When they spotted the blood, doctors discovered a nearly three-inch stab wound that sliced through her abdominal muscles, partially detaching them from her hip, and came within a millimetre of causing a potentially deadly rip in her colon.

Even now, no one knows what stabbed Shiffrin. Was it her pole or the fence she crashed through, or was it the force of collision and the dramatic, careening tumble she endured that caused the injury? Regardless, Shiffrin was possibly the unluckiest and most fortunate skier on the mountain that day. Alpine crashes are like that. As horrible as any crash can be, it is almost always much worse.

A ski patrol medic pulls Shiffrin off the course in Killington on a stretcher. (Sarah Stier / Getty)

Nearly nine months later, six months before the start of the 2026 Olympics, arguably the most important competition of her epic career, Shiffrin is gearing up for another critical offseason filled with camps in Colorado, Europe, and South America, as well as plenty of time in the gym to strengthen her core enough to withstand the torque of turning on Alpine ice. She persevered during her rehab and recovered from the injury in time to compete in the season’s final, chaotic weeks. She won her hundredth victory, followed by another.

The story of how she got here — in a position to rewrite her Olympic legacy after a disastrous Beijing Games in 2022 that included three falls in six races and no medals — is one of an athlete and her team searching for answers and attempting to create their own playbook for recovering from an injury that no skier at Shiffrin’s level had ever experienced. And there was so much at stake, including Shiffrin’s confidence and even her starting slot on the World Cup’s giant slalom circuit, which is one of her strongest events.

After some preliminary research, Shiffrin’s physical therapist, Regan Dewhirst, estimated that returning to competition would take between six and twelve weeks. The 2025 Alpine World Championships were planned to begin on February 4, nine and a half weeks after the Killington tragedy.

Shiffrin wanted to be there, racing. In getting there, she would learn the age-old lesson of sports and life: be cautious what you hope for.

“It was like, ‘Let’s just hammer what I can,'” she told me. “Let’s go dive right into it and see how quickly we can do this.'”

And then, possibly for the first time in her life, speed became her adversary.

Dewhirst did not witness the crash live. She’d been at the top with Mikaela, as she always is before Shiffrin begins flying down the slope. Dewhirst noticed just one thing on the scoreboard and her phone: Shiffrin had not crossed the finish line.

“It was obvious that whatever it was … it was going to be a long rehab,” said Dewhirst, another former professional skier who works as the chief operating officer of Shiffrin’s physique.

Dewhirst has known Shiffrin since they were junior skiers and has worked with her for seven seasons. She understands that when presenting a new idea or training program to the world’s top skier, she must conduct study first.

Dewhirst rapidly realised that Team Shiffrin was in unfamiliar territory, first in a Vermont hospital and then back at home in Vail, Colorado. This was neither an ACL tear or a bone break, which are leg injuries for which skiers can follow a set protocol.

Skiers do not sustain stab-like wounds through their oblique muscles. Worse, whatever stabbed Shiffrin did not enter or escape cleanly. It rummaged around and tore into her transversus abdominis, the deepest core muscle. It functions similarly to a corset, wrapping around the trunk and providing the spinal stability necessary for simple, everyday movements.

That resulted in far more inflammation and trauma than Shiffrin and her team had anticipated. Even after surgeons used a vacuum to extract the fluid, it remained trapped in her stomach.

Dewhirst would encourage her to move about and use her core to keep her muscles from atrophying. When she tried it on the right side, her hip and leg felt detached from the rest of her body.

Also, the fluid continued to rise. Doctors couldn’t drain it quickly enough. They became apprehensive that there could be an infection. They informed Mikaela and Eileen that they felt compelled to operate in order to learn the truth.

This was not what Eileen Shiffrin, who had spent years as a nurse, or her daughter wanted to hear. Surgery would involve cutting through more muscles, resulting in more tissue injury. They anticipated that this would delay her rehabilitation and return to competition.

“We were just crossing our fingers that she would heal from the inside out,” Eileen told me. “Then she showed signs of fever and chills.”

These were the classic symptoms of an illness. Now there was no other option. Returning to competition dropped down the priority list.

Then Shiffrin got a break. During the procedure, surgeons revealed previously unseen rips, including a separation of the muscle from Shiffrin’s right hip. They drained the fluid, placed a temporary drain, cleansed the area, and used sutures to mend the muscle damage. Now Shiffrin could heal correctly.

It had been about two weeks following the crash. The world championships were around eight weeks away. At the very least, Shiffrin can now begin to recover. She simply needed a plan.

Dewhirst had attempted to make one. There was much studies on baseball players and oblique tears. There was also some good tissue-healing studies for ice hockey and football players, who, like Alpine skiers winding down a mountain, must use their core muscles to generate force from inefficient body positions.

When Dewhirst saw doctors, she invariably ended up in the same place. Shiffrin had torn all three of her key core muscles. The tissue would most certainly recover in a few weeks, but they had no idea how long each tear would take to close, or when the muscle would be able to resist the power of a large slalom curve at around 50 mph.

Dewhirst was going to have to write a textbook on real-time recovery.

“My goal, basically, was like, OK, let’s create a document that we can give to each one of the coaches, all the techs, everybody on the team, so that they could kind of have a roadmap of where we were headed,” she said.

The goal was to combine what was going on at the cellular level with what Shiffrin could be capable of in training, first in the gym and then, if everything went well, on snow. The challenge was to convince everyone to agree on a course of action. Shiffrin, desperate to avoid losing the season, sought to push. Dewhirst, on the other hand, insisted on a minimum recuperation time of six to eight weeks.

“We made Regan repeat herself many times to be sure she couldn’t be moving faster,” Eileen told me.

Eileen and the rest of the crew were straining to deal with a complicated injury. They also understood that following Dewhirst’s protocol was the safest course of action.

“We all tried to take a breath and let Regan take the lead,” she said.

With that in mind, Eileen Shiffrin returned to the East to spend time with her extended family and “get out of everyone’s hair,” as she put it. Shiffrin’s brother, Taylor, and his wife, Kristi, drove up from Denver to assist her. Harjo returned home to Washington, checking in every few days.

Dewhirst and Shiffrin then set about reuniting the most decorated skier in the sport’s history.

Shiffrin shared a video of herself strolling gently around her neighbourhood soon after surgery. This marked the start of a slow and quick climb back—perhaps a bit too fast, in retrospect.

“If I was at rest or relaxing, then it was just more of an ache,” Shiffrin said in an April interview. “But walking was really painful for a while. Coughing and sneezing and laughing and going to the toilet were awful for weeks.”

Within a few days of surgery, the fluid and swelling were under control. They may start to press a little more to see how far she could go without pain. They walked quicker, with Dewhirst keeping a tight eye on Shiffrin to ensure she wasn’t compensating with other muscles and was moving normally.

They began with easy workouts that would activate Shiffrin’s core. Shiffrin would raise her hands. Dewhirst would push on them from various angles, while Shiffrin supplied resistance. Sometimes they worked seven hours a day.

By the second week, as the muscle atrophy subsided, they were able to push harder at Dewhirst’s multi-phase program. Over the next five weeks, they proceeded from light weightlifting and basic push-ups to full-range of motion exercises, with Shiffrin rotating from increasingly extreme angles and positions akin to those she would encounter on the mountain.

Then it was time to start mimicking the three-dimensional stress of skiing, focussing on Shiffrin’s movement, balance, and strength while working against gravity. Shiffrin was strapped into a flywheel, which created resistance as she attempted to spin it at various angles and positions. She lifted slosh pipes, which are tubes filled with water. The weight shifted around as she carried and balanced it.

She climbed the Glute Ham Developer, a gym version of a mechanical bull that does not move but allows for standard and inverted sit-ups against gravity and in any direction. She trained with balancing balls and Dyna Discs, which are puffy, flat circular discs that simulate planting on unsteady ground.

“Every time she did something that she hadn’t done in the previous week, it kind of gave her a little burst of energy and joy,” Dewhirst told me.

Eileen Shiffrin had returned to Colorado by then. Harjo kept calling to find out when Shiffrin would be back on snow.

After four weeks, Dewhirst and Shiffrin decided they were ready to attempt it. All of the coaches and technicians were fired up. However, there was one issue: they were not permitted to attend.

During Dewhirst’s initial investigation, Chad Drummond, a physical therapist for the Edmonton Oilers, informed her what she thought was the most useful information she gained from the process. He warned her that no matter what happened in the gym, things would often change once his players returned to the ice. The same may happen to Shiffrin if she tried skiing again, even recreationally.

Drummond had devised a method that often worked, however. He prohibited coaches from seeing a player’s first skates when they were healing from an injury. That relieved the pressure to perform. They could just skate, focus on themselves, and be honest with Drummond about their experiences.

“It was like, OK, we’re going to go out on snow,” Dewhirst recalled. “We got to test it. We’re treating it basically like we’re taking the PT clinic out on the mountain. And then if it goes well, let’s bring everybody back in.”

Dewhirst had transformed Shiffrin from the slowest of hikes to a pair of ski boots in four weeks. Nobody was about to question her now.

Shiffrin began on ultra-light, short leisure skis. There are no gates, so you can ski freely. Shiffrin felt tight and unpleasant on the first day, almost to the point of pain. She and Dewhirst spent two days at the gym before returning to the mountain. This time, she skied with little discomfort.

It was now time to bring the band back together.

Harjo returned to Colorado on familiar terrain. She had previously helped skiers recover from horrific injuries. She had even helped Shiffrin return from a knee injury to the podium the previous season.

She investigated the Killington crash. She understood what had happened. Shiffrin was skiing “on the limit,” which means taking the tightest possible route down the course at full speed, as a winner must do to win. She made a fast right turn as the slope slid to the left. She overloaded the edges. Her skis slid, and she fell hard and fast, with disastrous consequences.

“In an instant, the world as you know it has changed,” Harjo told me. “The goals, the purposes, everything that you’re designed to do, no longer exist, and you have to quite quickly pivot and adapt to something you never saw coming.”

Finally, they were back on the hill. The Alpine World Championships were only a few weeks away. As Shiffrin and Dewhirst completed their training, it was time for Harjo and the rest of the crew to transition Shiffrin from soft beginning trails to icy race tracks.

That necessitated another slow/fast progression and a lot of listening on Harjo’s end. She knew from previous experiences to let the skier take the lead, especially one as analytical and thoughtful as Shiffrin.

“She will tell you everything you need to know,” she said.

Shiffrin began with a couple runs every day on basic trails. When she was pain-free, she moved on to steeper trails. Then she progressed from softer to firmer snow, which required more rigorous turning and power.

Within a week, Shiffrin was demonstrating that she could perform both small, tight slalom turns and longer, quicker giant slalom turns. Harjo then permitted her to incorporate gates once she had accomplished this task.

They’d start with a few of severe runs every day, then add a few more, stopping abruptly if the pain or discomfort became unbearable.

After less than a week of training, Shiffrin, her mother, Harjo, Dewhirst, and the rest of the squad made the ultimate decision. A slalom event was scheduled for Courchevel, France, in less than a week. It was time for Shiffrin to put her fitness to the test on European snow, where the majority of the World Cup circuit takes place. Team Shiffrin purchased plane tickets and travelled across the Atlantic.

Shiffrin’s resume comprised 99 World Cup wins, three Olympic medals, two of which were gold, eight world championship gold medals, five overall World Cup season titles, and 11 season discipline titles. When she shows up for a slalom event, everyone expects her to win.

“Everybody was talking about (the 100th World Cup win), like you’re returning, maybe you can win 100,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Oh God, no, that’s not what this is.'”

She had gotten through the flight and jet lag just fine. Three days of training had gone so well that everyone gave her permission to race. She didn’t feel good about her skiing. Her body wasn’t doing what her brain expected, but it was time to take the test.

Exactly two months after her fall, she finished 10th in the night slalom at Courchevel, 2.04 seconds behind the leader. Then came Austria and the world championships, where Shiffrin was scheduled to compete in both slalom and giant slalom, the faster race in which she crashed in Killington.

Shiffrin felt compelled to race gigantic slalom. She had only competed in one giant slalom race since her Cortina fall the previous season. When she decided to return, she lost the opportunity to freeze her position and ensure her place among the top 30 racers in both slalom and giant slalom. Given this, she needed to produce some outcomes, both for the rankings and to boost her confidence.

She did not want the Killington crash to be her last giant slalom memory before the Olympic season. Even after 99 victories, including 22 in giant slalom, that final recollection trumped all others. So she dove into training.

It didn’t go well. She strained to get speed. The other ladies on the US squad appeared considerably faster than she was. Sometimes she would stop in the middle of a training run for no apparent reason. She had another hard crash during slalom training. She and her colleagues opted to keep it quiet.

Shiffrin competes in the women’s slalom in Courchevel, France. (Jeff Pachoud / Getty)

“There was a time when I thought maybe I should just go home,” she added.

She felt hesitant on the mountain. She’d stand at a starting gate, her helmet clicking shut, her goggles down, and a scene from another collision would flash before her eyes, a common occurrence for people suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She just didn’t realise that was what it was.

However, Eileen could sense it. She had witnessed Shiffrin slip into a fog in the months following her father, Jeff,’s death in a fall at their Colorado home in 2020. She experienced a similar situation following her downhill collision in Cortina, which hurt her knee.

“The brain just does weird things,” Eileen added. “It just turns on the governor.”

Eileen could sense her daughter’s mind was not working at its best. Mikaela couldn’t see the courses clearly as she walked down them. She couldn’t recall the courses she had just skied.

Mikaela had been attending a therapist since her father’s death, and she had been often reminded that “what’s mentionable is manageable.” This precept had infiltrated her entire team. They need to know when she is having a difficult day and when she requires assistance.

“It’s accepting it, and it’s helping her set action items to feel like it’s still attainable and not overwhelming,” according to Dewhirst.

While listening to Shiffrin’s symptoms, her therapist informed her that she fit all of the clinical criteria for PTSD. She also told Shiffrin she will get through it. To accomplish this, she needed to continually expose herself to what she feared, making it somewhat less frightening with each exposure.

Harjo had seen it all before, with so many of the ladies she taught colliding hard and sustaining serious injuries. The mental rehabilitation process can often take longer than the physical.

“It’s not talked about much,” Harjo explained. “For a lot of athletes … they get strong, they get back, and they’re just like, ‘OK, you’re good to go.'”

PTSD might cause skiers to be hesitant on the slopes. To ski with hesitancy invites peril. Racers must commit to the hill and concentrate on the split-second, instinctual manoeuvres they must execute.

“If your mind is not connected to what you are doing in that moment, it’s kind of like driving a car down the motorway blindfolded,” Harjo told me. “You’re just not connected. You can’t see.”

Shiffrin’s body had gotten ahead of her mind. Her swift physical recovery meant she could ski fast again, but her mind wasn’t ready, and there was only one way to prepare her.

She and her crew removed giant slalom from the menu. Harjo set to work creating basic, safe environments for her to ski and gain confidence. The pitch and ice returned gradually, as Shiffrin gained confidence.

Shiffrin inspects the course at the World Cup Finals in Sun Valley. (Sean Haffey / Getty)

Her mind had been impeding her progress, instilling anxiety in order to help her avoid what appeared to be danger.

“When you give them enough reps, in an environment that allows them to be very successful, then that becomes a new, automated process for the brain and body to work,” Harjo told me. “And then, and only then, after that, can you start kind of adding different challenges and elements.”

After a few days, the microdoses of confidence began to accumulate, and Harjo could see Shiffrin regaining her self-esteem; her energy level increased, and she smiled more.

She only skied slalom at the world championships, where she helped her team win the combined event and finished fifth in the individual race.

Then, on February 21, in Sestiere, Italy, she surged out of the gate of a giant slalom event twice. She finished both runs, and they felt wonderful; she’d never been happier to finish 25th.

Two days later, she won her 100th World Cup slalom at Sestiere, and in late March, she won the season’s last slalom race at Sun Valley, Idaho.

Shiffrin celebrates winning the women’s slalom in Sun Valley. (Christian Petersen / Getty)

She knows there could have been a simpler way: rest more, take it slow, and return fully fit for the 2025-26 season, but that would have carried another risk she wasn’t willing to take: starting a season nearly a year after feeling that rush of fear and adrenaline in the starting hut.

“It’s the Olympic season,” she added. “I want to start the year in Soelden (Austria, where this winter’s World Cup season begins) knowing what’s going on, not being blind to the fear factor of racing, and being able to deal with it.” I only know this because we received some exposure this year and began to work through it.”