Mikaela Shiffrin Skis to Olympic Redemption with Slalom Gold

Praise Allah. OMG. I was sitting on pins and needles. My belief in the USA is restored.

BTW, the Quad God should pay attention here. Dude...you haven't lost a skate in 2 1/2 years. Not kidding about that. She came back...you can to.

USA, USA, USA...China sucks, China sucks, China sucks. Sorry, lost my head there for a second.

Mikaela Shiffrin Skis to Olympic Redemption with Slalom Gold

The American star ended her medal drought with a vintage performance in her best event. She now has more golds than any other U.S. alpine skier in the history of the Games.

By Rachel Bachman, WSJ

Feb. 18, 2026 8:34 am ET

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy—Mikaela Shiffrin had spent more than a decade turning herself into the most successful alpine skier of all time. She racked up more World Cup wins than anyone in history and dominated the slalom like no one else.

Yet when it came to recent Olympic Games, her invincibility seemed to melt away.

On Wednesday, the real Shiffrin finally returned.

Eight years on from the disappointment of Pyeongchang and four years since her disastrous Beijing, the 30-year-old American exploded out of her Olympic slump with a slalom performance for the ages. On a shimmering course in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Shiffrin blew away the competition in her best event and reclaimed her status as an Olympic champion.

The victory not only reaffirmed her supremacy over the sport. The 12 years between Shiffrin’s slalom golds is the largest gap ever between individual gold medals in the same event at the Winter Olympics. It also gave her the third gold of her career, putting her ahead of every other skier in U.S. alpine history.

In Wednesday’s slalom, Shiffrin laid down a vintage first run in 47.13 seconds that gave her a lead of 0.82 seconds, despite a bobble halfway down the course. Shiffrin then hammered her second run to finish in 1:39.10. After crossing the line with a massive margin of 1.5 seconds, she pumped one fist high in the air.

Shiffrin entered the race knowing that it was her last chance to take something away from these Games—or be shut out for a second consecutive Olympics. She hadn’t just won. Shiffrin had put herself back in a class of her own.

Shiffrin had already missed a golden opportunity to medal last week in the team combined event, in which a slalom and a downhill skier each skis one run. Teammate Breezy Johnson had handed her the lead after a first-place performance in the downhill. So Shiffrin took to the snow knowing that Olympic hardware was within her grasp.

As it turned out, even a top-13 finish would have clinched the gold. Instead, Shiffrin turned in her worst slalom finish in more than a decade: 15th place. The result dropped the Americans to fourth and off the podium.

Five days later, in the giant slalom, Shiffrin finished 11th, despite sitting fourth in the season World Cup standings.

Even as Shiffrin had struggled at Olympic Games, on the World Cup circuit she kept winning at an unprecedented pace. Her 108 wins all time leads the second-place skier, Swede Ingemar Stenmark, by a wide margin. He retired in 1989 with 86 wins.

Shiffrin is known for her precise turns and consistency. She has won five overall season World Cup titles—given to the best skier across all disciplines—and nine season titles in the slalom.

But her performance in recent Olympics was a hard-to-explain stain on

Shiffrin’s otherwise stellar career. She said on a podcast before the Games that she viewed the trip to Cortina as a potential “nightmare.”

It was easy to understand why. After winning the slalom at Sochi 2014 Shiffrin, then an 18-year-old prodigy, blurted out that she’d love to win five golds at the next Olympics. And as she piled pressure on herself, she expanded her schedule to attempt five events at the 2018 Games—later scaled back to three—and six at Beijing 2022.

But after failing to finish half of her six races in China, Shiffrin pared back her ambition. In Italy, she limited her focus to just three, as long as she could climb back onto a podium at the Games.

And even if Shiffrin left it late, the strategy worked. In the space of 100 seconds on the slopes of Cortina, the greatest skier of all time had banished eight years of Olympic misery, nightmares, and self-doubt to become a champion again.