BEIJING — Athletes are assuredly role models. Mikaela Shiffrin was the No. 1 role model ever Wednesday. In defeat.
Understand: the reason you go to the Olympic Games is to win. Especially when you are arguably the best female alpine skier ever.
But when you crash out of your first race after just a few gates, the one where you are the defending Olympic champion, and then in your second race, the one in which you have won literally dozens of times on the World Cup tour, you ski out again, once more literally just seconds into the race, what then?
What then is the profile in vulnerability and, yes, courage that Shiffrin delivered Wednesday — though it may not feel like it to her just now, and may not perhaps for a very long time.
Simone Biles perhaps launched the conversation about athlete mental health in earnest last summer in Tokyo. Now, Shiffrin in Beijing. Arguably the two biggest stars on Team USA, Summer and Winter, and the fundamental question, amid the quest for medals: what to do when everything seems to be going … not right?
Start by acknowledging the obvious: it’s OK to not be OK. Like Mikaela Shiffrin did.
She said, “I started with a strong mentality and then I was out of the course,” and she was at a loss to understand why. Why the “good skiing,” the process, the core of everything she had trusted since was a little girl, was suddenly, abruptly betraying her. Now. When seemingly everyone in the world was for once paying attention to ski racing. Why?
“For me,” said Jessica Bartley, the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee’s director of mental health services since September 2020, “I feel like we have had so many celebrities, whether Hollywood, or athletes, or political figures destigmatizing it,” meaning mental health, and that’s 100% true, but only one slid out Wednesday on her skis and then sat on the side of a mountain in China for a very long time, the cameras trained on her, before skiing down, very slowly, literally millions of people wondering — what could she be thinking?
Bartley, an experienced psychologist, making plain that her remarks were general, emphasizing that she was not speaking about Shiffrin specifically, said, “The more it can be part of our conversation — the more those who struggle with mental health or need resources can get those resources,” a buildup the USOPC has intensely been engaged in for the past year and a half.
“There’s not something wrong with them,” Bartley said. “We don’t treat a sprained ankle the way we treat performance anxiety.”
Still clearly grieving for her father — this is the week two years ago that Jeff Shiffrin died of an accident — Mikaela Shiffrin allowed herself Wednesday to be vulnerable for a very long time in seeking to explain her emotions. At various points, meeting with reporters for an extended period, she said she was disappointed, frustrated, angry, optimistic, weighed down, not sure how to re-set, at a loss, like she had put in so much work for nothing, let herself down, let down other people, let down everything, so stupid to care this much.
And more.
Excuses? None.
Answers for why what happened, happened? None.
In the long run, what happened at the bottom of the hill, after what happened on the snow is what will matter the most.
Of course, the medals matter. Let’s be clear about that. They matter a lot. To the USOPC. To The U.S. ski team. To Mikaela Shiffrin. It’s why she worked so hard all summer: “My whole intention building up, this whole season, was to ski those races aggressively. And that’s what I was doing. The problem is, you have to finish, and that’s obviously my main issue right now, apparently.”
No, it’s not.
Her main issue is what’s going on inside her mind.
Which was obvious coming into these Olympics — that is, to read the thousands of words printed about her, or watch any number of the films or videos starring her.
Ski racing — like all sports, but especially ski racing — is a matter of confidence. To race aggressively, you literally have to be on the edge. Right now, it would appear that she is not there. Maybe she can get there by the end of the Games. Maybe not. Who knows?
The fact is, the two races that are her best — giant slalom and slalom — have now come and gone at these Games, and she slid out of both. The Olympics offers an event called a “combined,” a two-race combo of slalom and (usually) downhill; Shiffrin typically has excelled in combined. The question is whether she has enough mental game to race the super-fast downhill.
In the meantime, where she did herself, and perhaps many thousands and perhaps millions of other people around the United States and maybe even elsewhere a huge, perhaps life-saving, service on Wednesday, was in acknowledging that she, too, is a human being — with some of the very same frailties every single one of us has.
Every single one of us is broken.
If that phrasing is too strong for some of you — every single one of us is imperfect.
That means every single one of us needs help. We need family and friends. And sometimes we need people who understand better how to help us through things we don’t, or can’t, understand. Or maybe aren’t ever supposed to.
Mikaela Shiffrin, for instance, acknowledged Wednesday feeling the loss of her father.
“It does give me perspective,” she said, “but, right now, I would really like to call him.
“So, that doesn’t make it easier. He would probably tell me to get over it. But he’s not here to say that. So on top of everything else, I am pretty angry at him, too.”
You can hear the raw hurt in that, and — that’s so totally, completely understandable.
“The more the media writes about it, the better,” Bartley said. “Someone will relate and get the help they need. So — thank you.”