How Mikaela Shiffrin got put back together for another run at Olympic glory

Yahoo

06-08-2025

Eileen Shiffrin, the mother of the greatest skier in history, gazed upwards at the giant slalom hill in Killington, Vt., last November as her daughter, Mikaela, crashed through a gate, tumbled across the snow and ice, and slid into the safety netting near a stand of pine trees.
'She didn't seem like she was moving,' Eileen, a former competitive skier who has coached Mikaela since her toddler years, recalled during a recent interview. 'The way she fell she could have had a neck injury or back injury. I was trying to stay calm.'
Karin Harjo, Shiffrin's head coach, was on the side of the slope, about 150 feet below where Mikaela crashed, filming the run, for both coaching purposes and posterity. If things went as they were supposed to, Shiffrin was going to notch her unprecedented and previously unthinkable 100th World Cup win on home snow, in the state where she honed her craft through her childhood.
Then Shiffrin hit the snow. Harjo dropped her camera and sprinted up the mountain. Shiffrin was lying at the feet of a Swiss coach who had been watching this last meaningful run of the day from that spot. A ski patroller was already there, too. The first medic arrived just as Harjo did.
Harjo, a transplanted Canadian who lives in Washington State, has coached elite skiers for more than a decade. She has been around horrific crashes and tended to skiers with broken bones twisted in the wrong direction.
Shiffrin could still feel all of her limbs. Her neck and spine seemed fine. But she was in tremendous pain through her midsection and terribly cold, already shivering, in that paper-thin racing suit. And in that instant, no one knew why every breath and the slightest movements hurt so much.
'When you have a broken leg, you can see that it's deformed, so it makes sense in your mind,' Harjo said recently. 'But when somebody is laying on the ground in that kind of pain and there's not a deformity, there's no extreme blood coming out from anywhere, then you really are concerned because there's something happening inside that you can't see.'
Shiffrin's brain rarely stops analyzing, pondering, learning. Here, she had moved beyond thought. This was nothing like her crash the previous season in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, when she sustained a knee injury that paused her season for six weeks. All she could do now was feel — the pain in her abdomen and the frigid air. Harjo collected jackets to put around her.
'It was just killing me, and it was cold,' Shiffrin said during an interview in New York in April, as she munched on shoestring fries at the end of another uniquely long season.
The medics didn't figure out the cause of all that pain until they loaded the still-shivering Shiffrin into an ambulance and cut open her suit on the way to the hospital. That's when they saw the blood — from what they would discover was a nearly three-inch stab wound that cut through her abdominal muscles, partly separating them from her hip, and coming within a millimeter of causing a potentially fatal tear in her colon.
To this day, no one can figure out what stabbed Shiffrin. Was it her pole, or the gate she crashed through, or did the force of impact and the violent, careening tumble she took cause the wound? Regardless, Shiffrin was maybe the unluckiest and luckiest skier on the mountain that day. Alpine crashes are like that. As bad as any crash might be, almost always, they are very nearly far worse.
Nearly nine months on, six months before the start of the 2026 Olympics, arguably the most important competition of her epic career, Shiffrin is barrelling through another critical offseason filled with camps in Colorado, Europe and South America, and plenty of time in the gym to get her core strong enough to withstand the torque of turning on Alpine ice. She battled through her rehab and recovered from the injury to compete in the final, tumultuous weeks of the season. She got that 100th victory, and then another one as well.
The story of how she got here — in a position to rewrite her Olympic legacy after a disastrous Beijing Games in 2022 that included three falls in six races and zero medals — is a tale of an athlete and her team hunting for answers and trying to write their own playbook for coming back from an injury that a skier at Shiffrin's level had never experienced. And there was so much on the line, including Shiffrin's confidence and even her starting spot on the World Cup's giant slalom circuit, one of her best events.
After some initial research, Shiffrin's physical therapist, Regan Dewhirst, determined that returning to competition was going to take somewhere between six and 12 weeks. The 2025 Alpine world championships were scheduled to start on Feb. 4, nine-and-a-half weeks after the Killington crash.
Shiffrin wanted to be there, racing. In getting there, however, she would live that age-old lesson of sports and life — be careful what you wish for.
'It was like, 'Let's just hammer what I can,'' she said. 'Let's go dive right into it and see how quickly we can do this.''
And then, maybe for the first time in her life, speed became her enemy.
Dewhirst didn't see the crash live. She had been at the top with Mikaela, as she often is before Shiffrin starts flying down the slope. All Dewhirst saw, on the scoreboard and on her phone, was that Shiffrin hadn't made it across the finish line.
'It was obvious that whatever it was … it was going to be a long rehab,' said Dewhirst, another former competitive skier who essentially functions as the chief operating officer of Shiffrin's physique.
Dewhirst has known Shiffrin since their days as up-and-coming junior skiers and has worked with her for the past seven seasons. She knows that when she wants to present the world's best skier with a new idea or training routine, she has to come armed with research.
Very quickly, though, first in the hospital in Vermont and then back home in Vail, Colo., Dewhirst realized that Team Shiffrin was in uncharted waters. This wasn't an ACL tear or a bone break — leg injuries for which skiers can follow an established protocol.
Skiers don't suffer stab-like wounds through their oblique muscles. Worse, whatever stabbed Shiffrin, it didn't enter and exit cleanly. It rummaged around and tore at her transversus abdominis, the deepest core muscle. It acts like a corset, wrapping around the trunk and providing the spinal stability that simple, everyday movements require.
That created far more inflammation and trauma than Shiffrin and her team originally anticipated. Fluid bloated her midsection with no way to get out, even after doctors initially used a vacuum to drain it.
Dewhirst would try to get her to move around and engage her core to prevent her muscles from atrophying. When she tried to do it on the right side, she felt like her hip and leg were no longer attached to the rest of her body.
Also, the fluid kept building. Doctors couldn't drain it fast enough. They grew concerned that there might be an infection. They told Mikaela and Eileen they felt they had to operate so they could see what was really going on.
This was not what Eileen Shiffrin, who spent years working as a nurse, and her daughter wanted to hear. Surgery would require cutting through more muscles, causing additional tissue damage. They assumed that would delay her recovery and her return to competition.
"We were just crossing our fingers that she would heal from the inside out," Eileen said. "Then she showed signs of fever and chills."
Those were classic symptoms of an infection. Now there was no other choice. Returning to competition plummeted on the priority list.
Then Shiffrin caught a break. During the surgery, doctors discovered tears that they had not seen before, including where the muscle had separated from Shiffrin's right hip. They drained fluid, inserted a temporary drain, cleaned the wound, and used sutures to repair the muscle damage. Now, Shiffrin could heal properly.
Nearly two weeks had passed since the crash. The world championships were about eight weeks away. But now, at least, Shiffrin could start recovering. She just needed a plan.
Dewhirst had been trying to create one. There was plenty of research on baseball players and oblique tears. There was also some useful tissue-healing research for ice hockey and soccer players, who, like Alpine skiers twisting down a mountain, have to use their core muscles to create force from inefficient body positions.
When Dewhirst consulted doctors, however, she always ended up in the same place. Shiffrin had torn through all three of her main core muscles. The tissue would likely heal in a certain number of weeks, but they had no idea exactly how long it would take for each tear to close, or at what point the muscle could withstand the force of a giant slalom turn at roughly 50 mph.
Dewhirst was going to have to write the textbook on this kind of recovery in real time.
"My goal, basically, was like, OK, let's create a document that we can give to each one of the coaches, all the techs, everybody on the team, so that they could kind of have a roadmap of where we were headed," Dewhirst said.
The idea was to marry what was happening at a cellular level with what Shiffrin might be capable of in training, first in the gym and eventually, if all went well, on snow. The challenge was getting everyone to agree on a course of action. Shiffrin, desperate not to lose the season, wanted to push. Dewhirst, though, insisted on sticking with a six-to-eight-week recovery timeline — at least.
"We made Regan repeat herself many times to be sure she couldn't be moving faster," Eileen said.
Eileen and the rest of the team were struggling to process a complicated injury. They also knew the safest course of action was to respect the protocol Dewhirst had designed.
"We all tried to take a breath and let Regan take the lead," Eileen said.
With that in mind, Eileen Shiffrin headed back East to visit with her extended family and "get out of everyone's hair," as she put it. Shiffrin's brother, Taylor, and his wife, Christie, came up from Denver to help take care of her. Harjo went home to Washington, checking in every few days.
And Dewhirst and Shiffrin got to work on putting the most decorated skier in the history of the sport back together again.
Shortly after the surgery, Shiffrin posted a video of herself walking gingerly around her neighborhood. This was the beginning of a climb back that was both slow and fast — a little too fast, in retrospect.
"If I was at rest or relaxing, then it was just more of an ache," Shiffrin said during that April interview. "But walking was really painful for a while. Coughing and sneezing and laughing and going to the bathroom were awful for weeks."
Within a few days of the surgery, the fluid and swelling were under control. They could begin to push a little harder, to see how much she could do without pain. They walked faster, with Dewhirst watching closely to make sure Shiffrin wasn't using other muscles to compensate and was still moving normally.
They began to do simple exercises that would fire Shiffrin's core. Shiffrin would hold up her hands. Dewhirst would push on them from different directions as Shiffrin provided resistance. Sometimes they worked for seven hours a day.
By the second week, as the muscle atrophy subsided, they were able to go harder at Dewhirst's multi-phase program. Over the next five weeks, they progressed from light weightlifting and basic push-ups with a full range of motions, with Shiffrin rotating from more extreme angles and positions, similar to those she would encounter on the mountain.
Then it was time to start simulating the three-dimensional stress of skiing, working on Shiffrin's movement, balance, and strength simultaneously and against gravity. Shiffrin strapped into a flywheel, which provided resistance as she tried to spin it from different angles and positions. She lifted slosh pipes — tubes filled with water. The weight moved around while she carried and balanced it.
She mounted the Glute Ham Developer, a gym version of a mechanical bull that doesn't move but allows for both regular and inverted sit-ups against gravity and in every direction. She trained on balance balls and Dyna Discs — puffy, flat circular discs that create the sensation of planting on unstable ground.
"Every time she did something that she hadn't done in the previous week, it kind of gave her a little burst of energy and joy," Dewhirst said.
Eileen Shiffrin had returned to Colorado by then. Harjo kept calling to find out when Shiffrin was going to get back on snow.
After four weeks, Dewhirst and Shiffrin determined that they were ready to try that. All the coaches and techs were fired up. There was one issue though — they weren't allowed to come.
During Dewhirst's initial research, Chad Drummond, a physical therapist with the Edmonton Oilers, told her what she felt was the most valuable nugget she received through the process. He warned her that no matter what was happening in the gym, things were often different when his players got back on the ice. The same might happen to Shiffrin when she tried to ski again, even recreationally.
Drummond had figured out a strategy that often helped, though. He barred the coaches from watching a player's first skates while recovering from an injury. That removed the pressure to perform. They could just skate and focus on themselves and be honest with Drummond about what they had experienced.
"It was like, OK, we're going to go out on snow," Dewhirst said. "We got to test it. We're treating it basically like we're taking the PT clinic out on the mountain. And then if it goes well, let's bring everybody back in."
Dewhirst had gotten Shiffrin from the slowest of walks into a pair of ski boots in four weeks. No one was about to question her now.
Shiffrin started on super-light and short recreational skis. No gates, though, just free skiing. The first day, Shiffrin was tight and uncomfortable, nudging up against the pain threshold. She and Dewhirst went back to the gym for two days, then returned to the mountain. This time, she skied without any discomfort.
And now it was time to put the band back together.
Harjo returned to Colorado on familiar ground. She'd gotten skiers back from catastrophic injuries before. She'd even gotten Shiffrin back from the knee injury to the podium the previous season.
She had analyzed the crash at Killington. She knew what had happened. Shiffrin was skiing "on the limit," taking the tightest possible line down the course at maximum speed, the way a champion has to ski to win. She took a sharp right turn as the slope fell away to the left. She overloaded her edges. Her skis slipped, and she tumbled hard and fast, with pretty awful consequences.
"In an instant, the world as you know it has changed," Harjo said. "The goals, the purposes, everything that you're designed to do, no longer exist, and you have to quite quickly pivot and adapt to something you never saw coming."
Now, at last, they were back on the hill. The Alpine world championships were just a few weeks away. As Shiffrin and Dewhirst continued training, it was time for Harjo and the rest of the team to get Shiffrin from soft beginner trails to icy racing tracks.
That required another slow/fast progression, and plenty of listening on Harjo's part. She knew from past experiences to let the skier lead the way, especially one as analytical and thoughtful as Shiffrin.
"She will tell you everything you need to know," Harjo said.
Shiffrin started with just a few runs each day on basic trails. When she came through without pain, she moved to steeper trails. Then she went from softer snow to harder, which requires more intense turning and more force.
Within a week, Shiffrin was starting to prove that she could handle the short, tight slalom turns and the longer, faster giant slalom turns. Once she could do that, Harjo allowed her to incorporate gates.
They'd start with a couple serious runs a day, then add a couple more, with a hard stop whenever the pain or discomfort reached an unacceptable level.
After less than a week of training, Shiffrin, her mother, Harjo, Dewhirst and the rest of the team decided to take the final step. There was a slalom race less than a week away in Courchevel, France. It was time for Shiffrin to test her fitness on the European snow, where the World Cup circuit mostly occurs. Team Shiffrin bought plane tickets and headed across the Atlantic.
Shiffrin's resume included 99 World Cup wins, three Olympic medals, two of them gold, eight world championship gold medals, five overall World Cup season titles and 11 season discipline titles. When she shows up at a slalom race, everyone assumes she is going to win.
"Everybody was talking about (the 100th World Cup win), like you're returning, maybe you can win 100," Shiffrin recalled. "I'm like, 'Oh God, no, that's not what this is.'"
She'd come through the flight and the jet lag just fine. Three days of training had gone well enough for everyone to give her the green light to try to race. She didn't feel great about her skiing. Her body just wasn't doing what she thought her brain wanted it to, but it was time to take the test.
Exactly two months after her crash, she finished 10th, 2.04 seconds off the lead in the night slalom in Courchevel. Next up was Austria and the world championships, where Shiffrin was supposed to compete in both slalom and giant slalom, the faster race in which she had crashed at Killington.
Shiffrin felt like she had to race giant slalom. Since the crash in Cortina the previous season, she had completed just one giant slalom race. Once she decided to come back, she lost the opportunity to freeze her ranking and guarantee her spots among the top 30 racers in both slalom and giant slalom. Given that, she needed to produce some results, both for the rankings and for her confidence.
She did not want the Killington crash to be her final giant slalom memory heading into the Olympic season. Even after 99 wins, including 22 in giant slalom, that last memory outweighed all the others. And so she dove into training.
It did not go well. She struggled to find speed. The other women on the U.S. team seemed so much faster than she was. Sometimes she would stop in the middle of a training run with no idea why. She took another hard fall during slalom training. She and her team decided to keep that quiet.
"There was a time when I thought maybe I should just go home," Shiffrin said.
She felt tentative on the mountain. She'd stand at a starting gate, her helmet clicked shut, her goggles down, and a vision of another crash would flash before her eyes, a classic experience for someone struggling with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She just didn't know that's what it was.
Eileen, though, sensed it. She had watched Shiffrin descend into a kind of fog in the months after her father, Jeff, died in a fall at their Colorado home in 2020. She entered a similar state after her downhill crash in Cortina that injured her knee.
"The brain just does weird things," Eileen said. "It just turns on the governor."
Eileen could tell her daughter's mind wasn't functioning at its peak. Mikaela couldn't see courses properly as she made her way down them. She couldn't remember courses she had just skied.
Since her father's death, Mikaela had been seeing a therapist, who reminded her so many times that "what's mentionable is manageable." That tenet had permeated her team. They need to know when she is having a tough day, when she needs help.
"It's accepting it, and it's helping her set action items to feel like it's still attainable and not overwhelming," Dewhirst said.
As she listened to Shiffrin's symptoms, her therapist told her she met all the clinical criteria for PTSD. She also told Shiffrin she was going to get through it. To do that, she needed to expose herself repeatedly to what she feared, making it a little less scary with each exposure.
Harjo had seen all this before, with so many of the women she coached who crashed hard and suffered major injuries. The mental recovery can often take longer than the physical.
"It's not talked about a lot," Harjo said. "For a lot of athletes ... they get strong, they get back, and they're just like, 'OK, you're good to go.'"
In skiers, PTSD can cause hesitancy on the slope. To ski with hesitation is to invite danger. Racers need to commit themselves to the slope and focus on those split-second, instinctive maneuvers they need to make.
"If your mind is not connected to what you are doing in that moment, it's kind of like driving a car down the freeway blindfolded," Harjo said. "You're just not connected. You can't see."
In Shiffrin's case, her body had gotten in front of her brain. The quick pace of her physical recovery meant she could ski fast again, but mentally she wasn't ready to, and there was only one way to get her ready.
She and her team moved giant slalom off the table. Harjo went to work setting up simple, safe environments for her to ski and build confidence. Then, slowly, as Shiffrin grew more confident, the pitch and the ice returned.
Her mind had been getting in her way, turning on the fear to help her escape what felt like danger.
"When you give them enough reps, in an environment that allows them to be very successful, then that becomes a new, automated process for the brain and body to work," Harjo said. 'And then, and only then, after that, can you start kind of adding different challenges and elements."
After several days, the microdoses of confidence built up, and Harjo could begin to see Shiffrin becoming herself once more. Her energy rose. She smiled more.
She only skied slalom at the world championships, helping her team win the combined event and finishing fifth in the individual race.
Then, in Sestiere, Italy, on Feb. 21, she pushed out of the gate of a giant slalom race, twice. She finished both runs, and they felt good. She'd never been so happy to land in 25th place.
Two days later, she won the slalom at Sestiere, her 100th World Cup win. In late March, she won the last slalom race of the season at the World Cup finals in Sun Valley, Idaho.
She knows there might have been an easier way. Resting more, taking it slow, coming back fully fit for the 2025-26 season. But that would have carried another risk she was not prepared to take — entering a season nearly a year removed from feeling that rush of fear and adrenaline in the starting hut.
"It's the Olympic season," she said. "I want to start off the year in Soelden (Austria, where this winter's World Cup season begins) knowing what's up, not being blind to the fear element of racing, and to be able to take that on. I only know that because we got some exposure this year and started to work through that."
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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