Mikaela Shiffrin says she questioned returning to skiing amid PTSD after crash

New York Times

2 days ago

When Mikaela Shiffrin stood atop Killington Mountain for her second run of the giant slalom in the FIS World Cup race in November, she was considered the greatest alpine skier of all time. By the time she got to the bottom, being pulled in the back of a medical sled and rushed to the hospital after a devastating crash, her career was drastically altered, both physically and mentally.
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In a first-person essay for 'The Players' Tribune' published Friday, Shiffrin shared that the crash, which punctured her side and was a millimeter away from puncturing her colon, left her with psychological hurdles akin to PTSD when she began to mount her comeback.
'On particularly bad days, I'd question my motivation, or whether I still wanted to do this anymore,' she wrote. 'In my head, I'd be saying to myself: You know what, I kind of couldn't care less if I ever race again.'
As she initially attempted to return, the 30-year-old winner of three Olympic medals said she felt physically fine and wasn't afraid to get back on skis. But it was mid-run when her mind began to betray her body.
'I'd be trying really hard to be precise with my training runs, and my body just wouldn't do what I wanted it to do,' she said. 'Then, at some points, I'd get these random flashes in my mind. These really grim images. I'd be anticipating crashes. I'd see them in my head. See myself falling and going down. The pain would flash through my body, only this time, it was my neck too. My leg. My colon.'
Immediately after November's crash, Shiffrin wrote that she was hit with the most pain she had ever felt, and it was as if someone was stabbing her with a knife and left the blade in her abdomen.
When that pain later subsided at the hospital, she said she planned on treating her recovery the same way she had with any other injury. She underwent surgery 12 days after the crash and formulated plans to compete again by the end of winter.
But she said amid her focus on the smaller details of the comeback, such as getting in shape and sharpening her technique, she didn't think much about the mental element of her return.
On her first runs back on snow, she said skiing felt like running in molasses, or like being chased in a bad dream.
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'So I just kept sliding turns. Over and over again. And then, the weirdest thing was, a bunch of times I would just stop, right in the middle of a training course,' she wrote. 'Like I'm going through the course, doing my thing, and then, all of a sudden, I'd stop. I didn't have any intention of stopping. I wasn't planning to stop. But I'd stop. I'd slow myself down, and then just … stop.
'It was almost as though I was no longer in control of my body.'
Sessions with her therapist have led Shiffrin to believe a previous crash she suffered, at the beginning of 2024 in Cortina, may have acted as a past trauma event which — coupled with the Killington crash — can affect the way she reacts to new traumatic events.
After weeks and weeks of working through the processing with her counselor and tracking her symptoms against the PTSD diagnosis chart, Shiffrin said she saw improvements, not only on paper but in the way she felt. Particularly back on the snow.
After finishing tenth in her comeback race in January, she pulled out of the World Championships in Austria in February when she and her team realized she wasn't in the right state of mind to race.
Then, just a few weeks later, she was back in the victory circle in Italy, celebrating her 100th career World Cup victory.
'To be at the top, at the start gate, feeling all the feelings — nervous, excited, adrenaline, and ready … ready to take it on. And to just have that experience again, where I was racing like before and skiing fast?' Shiffrin wrote, describing her feelings leading up to the comeback win.
'It was like I could breathe again.'