driven, wasn’t coach-driven; they didn’t say I needed to train more,”
explains Shiffrin. “Actually, most of my coaches would say to me,
‘Where’s the fun?’ and I would just say: ‘I like training. This is what
I’m here for. That was the most fun I had, was training. I’ve grown to
like freeskiing more, but whenever I’m freeskiing I’m thinking about
something. It’s not a burden at all. That’s what I like to do.”
Did then, does now.
During the Shiffrins’ time in New Hampshire, where most of the
skiing was done at the Skiway of Dad’s alma mater, Dartmouth,
Taylor graduated from eighth grade, and the family needed a high
school. They settled on Burke and when Taylor entered as a freshman, Mikaela went along.
“I was homeschooling with my Mom,” Shiffrin says, “Both of us
were skiing with Burke, and then I just kind of moved on and to high
school here. There was another time where we went back and then
came back here. Do you want to know about that, too?”
I tell her there will be people who will devour every bit of informa-
tion printed about her. She smiles. “That’s nice to hear,” she says.
The notoriety — so far — hasn’t been much of a problem. “It’s fun
being known, but is a little stressful at times when I have to contact
everybody and focus on schoolwork and skiing and training and it’s
just everything put together,” says Shiffrin. “At the end of the day
I only got about two things done that I wanted to do, and not only
that I wanted to do but that I needed to do. Well, I usually get the
stuff done that I wanted to do; others, they can wait another day.”
Her schedule is full. “Spare time for me is homework time nowa-
days,” she says. “I watch movies every now and then, and to tell
you the truth I probably shouldn’t be watching movies.”
But let’s face it — we’re interested in Shiffrin not for her ability
to find time for movies, but for her ability to find time on a race
course.
“When I’m skiing, I’m skiing and that’s the bottom line,” she says.
“I don’t get nervous for races, or anxious or think about it more
than I do my training. There’s a saying — ‘Train like you race and
race like you train.’ — I don’t really think about that either. I go out
and ski. People tell me, ‘You do a good job of that,’ and it’s a nice
compliment, but that’s not what I think about. I just go out and feel
what I’m trying to do and feel what I could do better and then I try
to improve.”
At the World Junior Championships last season, she missed the
GS competition because of a stomach virus that nearly took her out
of the entire competition. She rebounded to win a bronze medal in
the slalom against competitors four years her senior.
“I don’t ski well everyday, by any means, but I have a really positive
attitude. My J3 coach, Kirk Dwyer, just drilled that into me — whenever I said I needed to do something with my skiing, he would say,
‘How do you say that in a positive way?’ So now I just say things in
a positive way, and I think positive. It’s really annoying sometimes,
but it also helps me a lot…When you know you can improve it’s
good. When you know you’re skiing well, it’s good. When you make
improvement, it’s good. There’s really nothing bad that can come
out of just skiing if you love it.”
