Mikaela Shiffrin, 30, may be a three-time Olympic gold medalist, but there was a time when just hearing the name of the Games felt overwhelming.
On Friday’s episode of “Not Gonna Lie with Kylie Kelce,” Shiffrin said getting ready for one of the biggest competitions in sports took years of work, much of it away from cameras and crowds.
“My Olympic experiences have been so wildly different. Now it’s four, and I’m really aware, right now, of all of the work that’s gone into — actually, not the medal — but the work that’s gone into showing up on race day, and being able to show up with the mentality and the skiing that I wanted to do,” Shiffrin told podcast host Kylie Kelce.
The grind continued even away from the slopes, she said, especially when it came to managing the pressure that comes with the Games.
“Even this summertime, the amount of conversations I had with my psychologist talking about all the different feelings surrounding the Olympics, and like desensitizing to the word, and imagining the vibe, imagining the colors,” Shiffrin said.
She added that she even visited Paris two summers ago to get a feel for the Olympic atmosphere and “desensitize” herself to it.
Not only that, Shiffrin has structured her life around staying physically and mentally ready at all times.
“There’s just so much life outside of the sport, but we do so much of our life, you know, it’s all geared towards the sport,” Shiffrin said, adding that she hasn’t had alcohol in two years because it tends to make her sick.
“And I’m like, I can’t afford to be sick, literally ever. So, we’re just going to not have any alcohol. Like, we’re going to drink electrolytes, man,” Shiffrin said.
It still throws her off that something she’s trained for over years can be decided in seconds.
“But you spend so much time doing all of this work and training for something, and then the moment it happens is, you know, 47 seconds, or like in the blink of an eye, and it’s just really weird,” she said.
Shiffrin is widely considered the greatest alpine ski racer of all time, with 108 World Cup wins. She made her Olympic debut at the 2014 Sochi Games at age 18, winning her first Olympic gold in slalom and becoming the youngest athlete in history to do so.
On Wednesday, nearly a decade later, she earned another gold medal in slalom — her first Olympic victory since 2018.
This isn’t the first time Shiffrin has spoken about the steps she takes to stay focused.
Speaking to WDSU News on Friday, she said she deliberately avoided social media in the lead-up to her races at the Winter Olympics.
“If I was scrolling my feed or something, I just knew I was going to come across things that would get into my brain that would be not at all conducive to the experience that my team and I came for,” Shiffrin said.
On Saturday, she told NBC Sports that she chose not to “set expectations” for herself heading into the Milan Cortina Games — a mindset she said ultimately helped her ski her best.
“On race day, I felt like I skied my best skiing, and that was really my goal,” she said.
