Latest news with #Killington
Yahoo
06-08-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
How Mikaela Shiffrin got put back together for another run at Olympic glory
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. Olympics, Global Sports, Women's Olympics 2025 The Athletic Media Company
New York Times
06-08-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
How Mikaela Shiffrin got put back together for another run at Olympic glory
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.' Advertisement 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. Advertisement '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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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." Advertisement 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. A post shared by MIKAELA SHIFFRIN ⛷💨 (@mikaelashiffrin) 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement "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.'" Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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." Advertisement 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. Advertisement "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." (Top illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; photo: Dustin Satloff / Getty Images)
RNZ News
30-05-2025
- Health
- RNZ News
Skiing: Michaela Shiffrin faced PTSD in recovery from severe crash
American skier Mikaela Shiffrin in action. Photo: PHOTOSPORT Twice Olympic champion Mikaela Shiffrin was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after a grisly crash during a giant slalom race in Killington, Vermont, in November left her with a puncture wound in her abdomen and severe muscle damage. The American wrapped up her season in March with a record-extending 101st World Cup win but wrote in the Players' Tribune on Friday that the crash in Killington - and another suffered at the beginning of 2024 in Cortina - took a mental toll. "Those two crashes maybe built on one another. I talked with my therapist about that, and she let me know that past trauma, or a history of traumatic events, can sometimes affect your reaction to new traumatic events," wrote Shiffrin, who lost her father suddenly in an accident in 2020. "Maybe when I crashed and got that puncture wound, maybe that was kind of a perfect-storm situation for PTSD to take hold. "But who knows, really. With all this stuff, there's just a tonne of nuance, and so much that we don't know for certain." Mikaela Shiffrin speaks out about PTSD. Photo: PHOTOSPORT Shiffrin, who is loved by American fans and praised by her fellow athletes for her upbeat attitude and resilience, said that getting back in the starting gate has helped the most in overcoming "the visions and the images I kept seeing". She wrote that after putting in the work on her mental health, she felt like herself again. "It was just continuing to get back up to the start gate. Just literally the process of going up the mountain and doing the thing I know how to do, again and again," wrote Shiffrin. "I just needed to keep doing it. Needed to keep reminding myself - proving to myself, really - that the vast majority of times when I am training or racing... nothing terrible happens." - Reuters
New York Times
30-05-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Mikaela Shiffrin says she questioned returning to skiing amid PTSD after crash
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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement '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.'
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Fresh Snow Is Currently Blasting Southern Vermont Ski Areas
It's May 22, 2025, but Mother Nature has delivered at least one last helping of snow to ski areas in Southern Mountain Resort took to Instagram to celebrate the occasion with a short clip from their Summit webcam feed. Temperatures are hovering just at freezing, but the heavy flakes are starting to stick as of 12:35 a.m. is also seeing some snow today. The resort officially closed for the winter season on Saturday, May 10, 2025, and was forced to temporarily pause summer operations due to this week's wet, windy, and cold weather. In preparation for up to an inch of rain and perhaps significant snow accumulation up high, Killington has delayed the Bike Park opening to Friday, May 30th, and the Adventure Center until Saturday, May 31st. The golf course is temporarily closed due to course damage from this week's storms, but Killington expects to reopen the course later this Snow appears to be receiving a mixture of rain and snow at higher elevations. The resort's Summit webcam view is obscured due to a thick layer of fog, but a few flakes appear to be accumulating on the green out webcam images of the new snowfall from Stratton (above) and Killington and Mont Snow below. All images captured at approximately 12:30 p.m. EST on May 22, to keep up with the best stories and photos in skiing? Subscribe to the new Powder To The People newsletter for weekly updates. The storm is expected to continue throughout today and into tomorrow, Friday, May 23, 2025. According to OpenSnow, accumulations could total anywhere from 1-3 inches at ski resorts in Southern current storm track has Northern Vermont missing out entirely, but some peaks in New Hampshire above 6,000 feet, including Mt. Washington, could accumulate up to six inches of snow before all is said and for east coast skiers, the only ski resort open in the entire region this late in the spring is Big Snow, the indoor ski slope located in New Jersey just outside of New York City. No matter. New Englanders with a proclivity for backcountry ski touring should be rewarded on the flanks of Mt. Washington in Tuckerman Ravine and snowfall isn't necessarily uncommon on New England's highest peaks, but the phenomenon is certainly worth celebrating as Vermont and New Hampshire most likely won't see winter weather for another five to six you're a New Englander who is planning on venturing up high for fresh turns this weekend, pack a camera and feel free to send me an email with your best shots. We'd love to share them right here on
