Mikaela Shiffrin made her debut at the Milan Cortina Olympics Tuesday, but her first race ended with a “huge surprise.”
The new team combined event got off to an exciting start as Shiffrin’s partner and recent gold medalist Breezy Johnson led the opening downhill leg of the event.
The team combined consists of one racer competing in a downhill run and another in a slalom run, with the times from the two added together to determine the results.
Shiffrin was among the last to ski in the slalom event.
“No tricks here at all,” Shiffrin was told over team radio before her run on a course set by an Austrian coach. “Actually it’s nothing to report. You got it.”
She lost time to the leaders at every checkpoint and crossed 0.31 seconds behind — missing a medal by finishing 0.06 behind the other American team of Jaqueline Wiles and Minnesota’s Paula Moltzan, who took bronze, marking their first Olympic medals ever.
In the finish area, Johnson — who was coming off a gold in the individual downhill — embraced Shiffrin, while the podium finishers began celebrating.
“That is a huge surprise,” broadcaster Dan Hicks said of the finish.
Shiffrin, the most successful World Cup racer of all time with a record 108 victories — 71 of them in slalom, also a record — has now gone seven straight Olympic races without a medal.
“I didn’t quite find a comfort level that allows me to produce full speed,” Shiffrin said. “So I’m going to have to learn what to do, what to adjust in the short time we have before the the other tech races.
“I want to be careful not to make excuses because it’s not really an excuse. … I’ve been so prepared for all the slaloms this year. So there’s something to learn from this day. And I’m going to learn it.”
After taking two golds and a silver from her first two Olympics, Shiffrin didn’t win a medal in any of her six races at the Beijing Games four years ago.
Shiffrin and Johnson are childhood friends and Johnson had said after her downhill run, “I already have my gold medal. I hope that she has fun and does her best. But if anything happens I’m not going to be like, ‘Oh you ruined anything.’”
Ariane Raedler and Katharina Huber of Austria won gold.
The team combined consists of one racer competing in a downhill run and another in a slalom run, with the times from the two added together to determine the results.
Shiffrin still has her individual events of giant slalom and slalom to come.
In Beijing, Shiffrin didn’t finish three of her six races and her best individual result was ninth in super-G. She has narrowed her focus for the Milan Cortina Games and is competing in only three events.
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