Olympics
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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.
